Streaming

When you connect to this computer from elsewhere (game streaming with Sunshine and Moonlight, RustDesk, or an RDP client), the stream unlocks the desktop and feeds it virtual keyboard and mouse input. Your desktop treats that exactly like someone sitting down, so without help TisVlay would power on the physical TV in an empty room.

Stream awareness prevents that. While a stream is active, TisVlay marks the affected TVs as armed: it holds back the actions that would turn them on, while still letting blanks and power-offs through. When you walk back to the machine, the TV wakes on your first touch of the mouse or keyboard.

You don’t need to set anything up for the common cases. Just connect.

What it does when armed

Wake actions are held back. Unlocking, touching the lock screen, activity resuming from idle, and your display waking (DPMS) don’t turn the TV on while it’s armed.
Blanks and power-offs still happen. Locking, idle blanking, sleep, and display blanking go through, so a TV that’s on still darkens for the empty room.
Starting and ending have their own actions. When a stream arms the TV, the profile’s On stream start action runs (out of the box it blanks the panel). When it ends, On stream end runs (out of the box it blanks too, since the room is still empty).
Your return wakes it. After a stream ends, your first genuine touch of the PC’s mouse or keyboard runs On local return (out of the box it lights the screen and switches back to your PC’s input). This covers the case where your desktop never locked or idled while you were away, so no unlock event would otherwise relight the TV.

You can override the hold-back per event. In the Profiles editor, each event row has a network icon: when it shows Suppressed while streaming, the event is held back while armed; click it so it shows Fires while streaming to let the event run anyway. See Automation.

What counts as a stream

Source	Arms the TV	Notes
Sunshine / Moonlight	automatically	no setup; TisVlay detects it
RustDesk, RDP	automatically	detected through the desktop’s screen-sharing system
Any other screen capture (OBS, a browser tab share, …)	only if you turn on Screen capture arms	TisVlay can’t tell who’s capturing, so it’s opt-in
Your own script or tool	when it tells TisVlay	see Advanced

Software KVMs such as lan-mouse never arm, because they run while you’re physically present. A plain SSH login doesn’t arm either; only a graphical remote desktop does.

Screen capture arms is a switch on the STREAMING card of a user profile, in the Profiles page. Turn it on if you want any screen recording to hold back TV wakes. Leave it off (the default) and only the recognized streaming apps arm.

Seeing it work

While any TV is armed, the tray menu shows a read-only Stream active line. That’s the quickest way to tell that TV wakes are being held back on purpose; see GUI & Tray.

Advanced: Sunshine and manual control

Everything here is optional. Sunshine works without it, and the command line is only needed to arm TisVlay from your own scripts.

Sunshine integration

TisVlay detects Sunshine by watching Sunshine’s own status endpoint on this computer, which is why no configuration is needed. That endpoint sits on Sunshine’s base port, at its default unless you’ve moved it (the default is under --sunshine-port in the command-line reference). If you’ve moved Sunshine to another port, tell TisVlay where to look, or it will poll whatever now answers on the default port:

NixOS: services.tisvlay.sunshinePort = 48989; (Sunshine’s configured port).
Other distros: add --sunshine-port 48989 to the session service’s command line with systemctl --user edit --full tisvlay-session, then systemctl --user restart tisvlay-session.

To arm the TV the instant Sunshine launches, a second or two ahead of the status check, add a prep-command hook to Sunshine’s global_prep_cmd setting:

{
  "global_prep_cmd": [
    {
      "do": "tisvlay stream start --source sunshine",
      "undo": "tisvlay stream stop --source sunshine",
      "elevated": false
    }
  ]
}

The hook is purely a latency optimization. If you run an unpackaged build, give the hook the absolute path to tisvlay and pass the --socket and --user-socket flags explicitly, since Sunshine runs hooks outside your shell environment.

Manual control

For a remote tool TisVlay doesn’t recognize, arm and disarm it yourself:

tisvlay stream start --source myapp   # arm
tisvlay stream stop  --source myapp   # disarm
tisvlay stream status                 # show live sources + armed TVs

These talk to your user session service, so add --user-socket if you’ve moved it from the default. tisvlay watch shows the stream state live, alongside everything else.

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