If you watch movie or listen to music before going to sleep, it may happen that you doze off while the media is playing. You surely wouldn’t want your computer to be running throughout the entire night. It is possible to set timers to turn off computer, but why go through the trouble of calculating total playing time when you can automate the process. Here are some ways to automatically shutdown or hibernate computer after a movie, music, audiobook or playlist finishes on a few popular media players:
Shutdown Computer After Winamp Finishes Playback
Winamp comes with built-in feature to perform shutdown after a movie, music or playlist ends.
To set this up, add media files that you want to play to Winamp playback queue. Then right-click on the stop button and choose an action to perform from “On end of queue” submenu list. Available options are:
Close Winamp, Log off, Restart, Shutdown, Standby, and Hibernate.
Shutdown Computer After Media Player Classic Finishes Playback
Media Player Classic also comes with a native feature that allows users to shutdown, among other actions, computer when playback ends.
To set an action, right-click on the playing movie or the player screen, and find the context menu entry for “After Playback”. Divided in two sections – Once and Every time – you can choose to Exit, Stand By, Hibernate, Shutdown, Log Off, Lock, or Do Nothing (default).
Shutdown Computer After iTunes Finishes Playback
NightTunes is a small plugin for iTunes that can automatically turn off computer at the end of a playlist. For it to work, you just need some tracks in the iTunes playlist.
Once installed, bring up the plugin via the system tray icon, select a Shutdown method and check “Active” to enable NightTunes. The Lite version can only shutdown, but if you want features to hibernate or standby computer, you can purchase NightTunes for €2.99 (around $4).
Sleep Computer After VLC, Windows Media Player and BBC iPlayer Finishes Playback
Sleep# is a small program that detects end of fullscreen video playback and sends computer to sleep. Before sending to sleep, the program provides a grace period (2500 milliseconds) during which you can interrupt the process if you are still awake.
From the system tray, you can ask Sleep# to hibernate, sleep, or simply turn off the monitor. It works with VLC media player, Windows Media Player, and BBC iPlayer for streaming videos, although while testing I found it to work with Media Player Classic as well.
At the moment the program doesn’t provide you with an option to change configuration via the program. To change any settings open Sleep#.exe.config file found in the same folder as the executable.
Shutdown Computer After BS.Player Finishes Playback
BS.Player has a native feature to shutdown computer. Follow these steps to enable it:
- Launch BS.Player
- Press Ctrl + P to open BS.Player Preferences window
- Under General settings, click on “When finished” dropdown menu and select Shutdown computer.
- Click Close to save your settings.
Shutdown Computer After KMPlayer Finishes Playback
KMPlayer allows you to control settings for audio and video separately. To access these settings, open Preferences (F2), and go to General > Repeat/Playlist > [General]
There you can choose to shut down only once or after each playback, until you disable the option.
All said and done, just remember to make sure that “shuffle” and “repeat” options are disabled in the player of your choice, otherwise the playback will still be there to greet you in the morning. 😉