Prevent sleep when CPUs busy?

[Fender]

I haven't done any searching yet, just posting to see if someone knows a good solution.

I'd like my HTPC to go to sleep when it isn't active. Unfortunately, "inactive" seems to mean "nobody has touched the KB/mouse in X minutes," not if the computer is really "inactive." I want it to stay awake while encoding (high CPU), etc., but automatically go to sleep otherwise.

Any ideas?

[^misantropia^]

OS?

[Fender]

Sorry... Win7.

I went w/ Win7 because there's good support for nvidia's CUDA GPU extensions under Windows for decoding h.264, but not so much under Linux.

[Bacon]

All the programs I have / tried shuts down the computer after x amount of seconds when cpu usage is below y, which is useless because you want it to sleep, not shut down...

Theres lots of documents online that could help write your own program for this, I can't see it being too complicated, but don't take any of my word for it, im a noob.

[Fender]

Hmmm... maybe time to cut my teeth on .NET

[Foo]

Check the software you're using to encode. Some of them have option flags for 'prevent computer going into sleep mode' while they're running.

LAME has this IIRC, and most torrent apps.