basic playback with programmatically created windows media player

Question

I was trying to \"just quickly integrate\" the Windows Media Player via COM to play single files from the local file system or http sources - but due to the sparse

Answer 1

WMP supports two automation methods, embedded ActiveX or COM server. For embedded use, you add the ActiveX via an object tag (execute some scripts via IHTMLWindow2 from your BHO/Band) or a hidden form and automate from there. See Using the Windows Media Player Control in a Web Page and Hosting the Windows Media Player Control in a Windows Application for sample codes.

For COM server use, just create the player as COM server and automate from it. You can either make it a UI-less playback engine, or remote it so you have a full UI.

Windows Media Player plays asynchronously, for example, it could call IMediaControl::Run and return immediately when you call put_URL (another immediate call to play would fail because it is already playing). If you do not need the automatic playing, I guess you need IWMPSettings::put_autoStart.

WMP assumes itself to be in the main thread. If you are in a worker thread or a MTA thread, I suggest you span another process to automate it, or remote it as an out-of-proc server.

Answer 2

After further investigation, it turned out that this was actually caused by a VS2005 workaround for VS2008s AtlSetPerUserRegistration() which was always active - but should have been only for the contained COM servers registration/unregistration.

The workaround overrides HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE with HKEY_CURRENT_USER, which obviously results in quite some components failing if they are created in-process.