MMcM
October 13th, 2002, 12:55 PM
I imagine that most of us use something like Zoom Player for displaying downloaded media. However, it does not support streaming media (yet). For that, I still use the Windows Media Player.
WMP does not expose its state in any of the ordinary ways. But it does have a fairly sophisticated skins mechanism, using XML and JScript. It turns out that skin elements are just a special kind of ActiveX controls. As it should be, their extent is controlled by the registry.
Version 1.10 of DVDSpy adds a new control element. Instead of displaying in the skin, it sends its value to Girder. (Actually, in addition to -- but I see no good reason to ever make one visible.) The skins system's listening attribute mechanism makes it easy to expose things like the current media name or the current player position. JScript can be used for slightly more complex things, like sending an event when the player is about to close.
There is a sample skin and as usual the sample .GIR file shows how I display on a 4x20 LCD.
WMP does not expose its state in any of the ordinary ways. But it does have a fairly sophisticated skins mechanism, using XML and JScript. It turns out that skin elements are just a special kind of ActiveX controls. As it should be, their extent is controlled by the registry.
Version 1.10 of DVDSpy adds a new control element. Instead of displaying in the skin, it sends its value to Girder. (Actually, in addition to -- but I see no good reason to ever make one visible.) The skins system's listening attribute mechanism makes it easy to expose things like the current media name or the current player position. JScript can be used for slightly more complex things, like sending an event when the player is about to close.
There is a sample skin and as usual the sample .GIR file shows how I display on a 4x20 LCD.