When watching web videos or DVD movies on your
computer, your video playback may be interrupted in many different ways.
For instance, the screen saver can activate itself
or the computer screen may enter sleep mode if you don’t touch the mouse or the
keyboard for a long period (because you are busy watching the video).
Sometimes, pop-up notifications from IMs and other programs that are running in
the background can also interrupt playback.
You can easily turn-off these distractions through
Windows Settings but the problem with this approach is that the changes will
stay even when you are done watching the video. To give you an example, if you
disable the screensaver before hitting play, it will stay in the disabled state
forever unless you re-enable it manually.
Therefore, instead of fiddling with your existing
configuration, you may consider using utilities that will also disable all
these distracting elements, but only temporarily.
Some media players are start enough and will
automatically turn off the screen saver during video playback. If you are using
VLC, go to Video settings and check the option that says “Disable screensaver.”
In Windows Media Player, go to Player options and uncheck the box that says
“Allow screen saver during playback.”
If your media player doesn’t have such a feature,
you can use this excellent utility called Mouse Jiggler to prevent the
screensaver from becoming active. It moves the mouse pointer back and forth
periodically so Windows will never go into an idle state and therefore the
screensaver won’t show up.
The next task is keep your monitor awake during the
video playback. Mouse Jiggler should care of this part as well or you may try
Caffeine – it’s like Jiggler but simulates keystrokes instead of mouse
movements.
There’s nothing to install or configure – just
download and run Caffeine and your system will stay awake as long as you like.
Double-click the Caffeine icon in the task bar and it will disable itself – all
this without making any changes to your system register or power plan.
If you have too many apps running on your system,
they are consuming system resources and some of them, especially the chat
clients, may surprise you during playback with notifications. You can either
right click-click in the task bar to selectively close these apps or get a
utility like CloseAll that will automatically close all running applications
with a click.
CloseAll closes all running apps by default
(including itself) but you can also configure it to ignore certain applications
by adding a simple exclusion list to the CloseAll.exe command line. Here’s an
example:
CloseAll.exe
-x="explorer.exe|firefox.exe|outlook.exe|dropbox.exe"
An excellent alternative to CloseAll is SmartClose
– it will not only close all the running programs with a click but can also
restore all these the programs once you are done watching the video.
It does this by capturing a snapshot of all the
running process and services. If there’s a particular program or Windows
Service that you would not like the utility to close, just add it to the
protected list. The default settings are good enough though you can always
choose the location where these system snapshots should be stored.
Finally, if you like watching videos while
simultaneously working on other windows /tasks, check out Always on Top – this
is again a free utility that will help you stick your media player window on
top of other program windows. Launch the program, select the media player
window and press Alt+Space bar to put it on top.
