Looking at the new screenshots the idea of this being a suitable time to get a sleep timer into the XBMC interface came to me.

Basically if watching TV late in the bedroom I often set the TV to sleep mode for 2 different reasons. Sometimes its to stop me staying up all night watching stuff, kind on an anti-alarm clock! Othertimes its so things don't keep running all night for no reason.

Was only last night that I fell asleep while watching stuff, woke up at 5am to realise that the xbox was still on with its fan noise filling the room (seeming particularly loud at 5am, with no other sound)...then I have to get up and switch it off, or find the remote in the bed, either of which fully wakes me...at which point it's much harder to go back to sleep!

Having looked around it appears that there's already a Python script that can shutdown XBMC after a certain period of idleness, but not sure that this does what I want, in that I wanted something I can activate manually to shutdown XBMC after 'X' amount of time no matter whether the xbox is still playing music or watching video at the time.

Anyway here's my ideal specification

- New item on the 'Shutdown' half blade > 'Shutdown in X minutes'

- Clicking on that item brings up dialog with options for 15, 30, 45, 60, 120, 180, 240
(Hopefully those options would cover most lengths of content people were watching, obviously there's potential extra work to add a custom field, but would that be of interest to people?)

- Script works in background keeping an eye on the time

- When it gets to shutdown time pop-up a dialog informing user shutdown is due, with countdown timer running down from 60 seconds within dialog.

- On that dialog offer options: 'Cancel Shutdown' , 'Change Shutdown' , 'Shutdown Now'
(Change Shutdown obviously aborts counter and puts you back to original timer choice screen)

Hopefully this is all possible, not sure how multi-threaded XBMC is, and I know this is borderline of whether this is a general XBMC function, but would love it tightly integrated into the skin, hopefully PM3 could then inherit this further down the line.

To avoid flaming this is definately a 'nice to have' feature, so happy to wait until after 1.0 for things like this!

RedRobin666

I agree. This would be a nice feature to have. I hope that BlackBolt will incorporate this into his skin. Thanks and I always enjoy new ideas. BlackBolt himself says ideas about new features are good. Thanks alot.

You can already use a sleep function in xbmc(it just isn't as convenient as the one you are asking for). Use the following command in your keymap.xml:
<obc##>XBMC.AlarmClock(Sleep,XBMC.ShutDown)</obc##>

It pops up the number pad and you specify the number of minutes untill shutdown. If you don't use a universal remote, look for a button that isn't used (like the black or white button).

HOLD IT!
No more features untill v1 release.
And what autoxerFSP21 said but NO more features should be added to the skin until v1 gets out.

D/L this from XBMCscripts.com
VERY handy

LINK!

All the thing you wanted to do, you CAN do.

i was going to suggest the same alterswede, i really love that script

alterswede & autoxerFSP21:
Many thanks for the info, that'll definately keep me going, the script looks good, will try out this week.

saadu:
I did originally post that I'm happy to wait for this, but is something I'd like on a skin wishlist for the future.

General:
Now that Blackbolt has confirmed that the skin will be in-cluded with T3CH's XBMC builds I think that takes a lot of presure off the MC360 team, as I'm sure they were worried that they needed to produce a perfect release client that would be forward compatible with XBMC builds, and when updates happened ensuring that people tried to use the right version of MC360, with the right build of XBMC.

If MC360 are getting their skin to people along with the latest XBMC build they can afford to do more regular smaller updates to the skin each month, rather than worry about announcing and distribution of a seperate skin download, which I would think people would accept more like 3-6 monthly max.

From other info it sounds like the MC360 team is becoming the XBMC Skin Team as they're now talking about updates to PM3 and new future skins (Botton of large BlackBolt post http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?sho...ic=510089&st=15) which makes sense as obviously this is a great team, with fantastic skills, come together to produce a A+ skin, and it would be a shame if all the experience on MC360 was lost, or gradually ebbed away once the intial release was complete. (As many open source projects have)

RedRobin666

Hmmm, intergration of this feature into the skin would be perfect, no need for a script.

Has anyone ever thought of what happens if you use another scriptafter you activated the sleeptimer script? Would this work? An integration into the skin itself would be fantastic!

Wait, isn't this a part of the regular Xbox dashboard? Wouldn't that setting apply no matter what dash/game you are running?

Why dont you just set the xbox to shutdown after so long being idle, xbmc has done this for ages..

renz0r:
I know its picky, but the Idle sleep function won't work for what I want if the Xbox is still doing something like playing music or a long movie?

I did notice last night that the settings seem to have an additional, 'While movie playing' option which I haven't fully explorer yet, but even if that does work it seems a permanent setting, and pretty buried. You wouldn't want to have to go in there every time to change it from 30min to 1hr, etc sleep options each time before going to bed...

The Idle shutdown likely does help with the shutoff when playing a movie and xbox has just been 'forgotten' about, but doesn't solve the 'anti alarm clock' option I was really looking for. That Shutdown script by vultilion all the functions I asked for, but again I'd just love it to be part of a polished UI, rather than a seperate script (Very lazy I know, but we are talking about a Sleep function here )

Obviously from what the team have said about some tutorials to help customise things it should be very possible to add a link to that mentioned script into the skin ourselves after release...it just then wouldn't have the nice matching interface, but functionally would do the job.

Devs:
Please keep this idea on lowest priority post 1.0 wishlist, if you feel its worthy.

It would be a good idea to add something like this to the Shutdown menu.