How do I implement Quicktime ActiveX control?

[lancetboy76]

Hi,

I would like to know if anyone out there has had success inserting a Quicktime ActiveX (or DLL) object into a VI. This is not as simple as I thought... Apple doesn't provide a *.ocx file with quicktime. Inserting Windows Media Player into a VI, contrarily, is very simple. However, the media player doesn't have certain basic features that I need (like the ability to advance one frame at a time) and has things I don't need (like web streaming). I don't have much experience inserting DLL's into VI's so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[scraggs99]

I didn't have a lot of time to play around with this but hopefully this info will be helpful.

1. First, Playing around with the ActiveX methods and properties is pretty straightforward. You just need to use invoke and property nodes to use them. The hard part is knowing what all the methods do! I found this web page which goes through all of that. Use it as a reference.

http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/quicktime/qtdevdocs/REF/QT41_HTML/QT41WhatsNew-72.html

2. I am including an example VI which shows how to open and close the application refnum and call a method using the invoke node. This is the basic pattern to use. All invoke and property nodes go in between the open and close.


Good Luck! Mostly it just takes playing around wi
th the documentation. If I get a chance I will play around with this more later.

[lancetboy76]

Thanks scraggs99,

I'm having trouble finding the actual file that IS the
ActiveX control for Quicktime. I know I need to register it with windows, but when I installed Quicktime 6 I could not find a *.ocx file to use. I'll try looking again.

[Rolf]

"lancetboy76" wrote in message
news:50650000000500000056C00000-1031838699000@exchange.ni.com...
> Thanks scraggs99,
>
> I'm having trouble finding the actual file that IS the
> ActiveX control for Quicktime. I know I need to register it with
> windows, but when I installed Quicktime 6 I could not find a *.ocx
> file to use. I'll try looking again.

Maybe Quicktime 6 is different, but in Quicktime 5 the OCX control
distributed
to allow Quicktime movies being seen in IE is such a minimal implementation,
that it won't be possible to make something useful with it from within
LabVIEW.

It is really just the minimal OLE control possible to work in IE, and does
have one
single method to send a command string to it, which is nowhere documented.
Ap
ple
also stated then that they will try to create a better one but have no
intention to
document the current interface in any ways as they don't want to encourage
anyone
using it. It really just a hack to allow Quicktime being used in the new
Netscape
plugin incompatible IE versions.

Rolf

[lancetboy76]

Thanks Rolf,

I did find the Quicktime version 6 ActiveX control and have played around with it a little. It has a long list of methods for use in a property node, but no methods for use in an invoke node. I'm not sure how I would enter a file name for it to open. I'm going to keep looking for a rosetta stone for this bit.