Question

I am looking for a program that measures system idle time on Windows. I have found many codes that do this. For example,

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/GetIdleTimeWithCS.aspx

However, I also want to take into account user watching movies, videos, etc. That time no input is given, but still the system is not idle.

Is there anyway to do this?

Answer 1

This function detects if a process is running in fullscreen in forground, and returns name of the process if found so:

    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    static extern IntPtr GetForegroundWindow();

    [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    static extern bool GetWindowRect(IntPtr hWnd, out RECT lpRect);

    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    private static extern Int32 GetWindowThreadProcessId(IntPtr hWnd, out uint lpdwProcessId);

    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    private static extern bool
    GetWindowPlacement(IntPtr hWnd, ref WINDOWPLACEMENT lpwndpl);

    private struct POINTAPI
    {
        public int x;
        public int y;
    }

    private struct RECT
    {
        public int left;
        public int top;
        public int right;
        public int bottom;
    }

    private struct WINDOWPLACEMENT
    {
        public int length;
        public int flags;
        public int showCmd;
        public POINTAPI ptMinPosition;
        public POINTAPI ptMaxPosition;
        public RECT rcNormalPosition;
    }

    public string FullscreenProcess()
    {
        IntPtr foreWindow = GetForegroundWindow();

        // get the placement
        WINDOWPLACEMENT forePlacement = new WINDOWPLACEMENT();
        forePlacement.length = Marshal.SizeOf(forePlacement);
        GetWindowPlacement(foreWindow, ref forePlacement);

        if (forePlacement.rcNormalPosition.top == 0 && forePlacement.rcNormalPosition.left == 0 && forePlacement.rcNormalPosition.right == Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Width && forePlacement.rcNormalPosition.bottom == Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Height)
        {
            uint processID;
            GetWindowThreadProcessId(foreWindow, out processID);
            Process proc = Process.GetProcessById((int)processID);

            return proc.ProcessName;
        }
    return null;
    }

After this, we just need to match the returned process name with a set of popular media players or other processes.

Limitation is that we have assumed user plays in fullscreen.