Multiple Media Player ActiveX Controls

[Ian Renton]

I have a system that displays both "live" video files and historical ones at the user's request. For this, I am using Windows Media Player ActiveX controls.

The "live" (not really streaming, just a new video file every few seconds) display is part of my main Front Panel, whilst the historical files play in a pop-up window (also a VI) when the user requests them.

The "live" control works fine until a historical video is requested and the pop-up appears. As soon as the second WMP ActiveX control appears on-screen, both of them stop displaying video!

They're trying - when either one of them should be playing a file, "Playing..." appears in their status bar and the play time counts up - but there's no video.

The problem persists even after the pop-up is closed.

Any idea how to solve this problem?

I push files to the ActiveX control by first calling "newMedia" in an Invoke node, then putting the reference from that into the "currentMedia" property of a Property node. Is this the right way of doing it?

(LabVIEW 8.2, WMP 10, WinXP SP2)

Thanks!

Message Edited by Ian Renton on 10-22-2008 05:53 AM

[John.P · Accepted solution]

Hi Ian,

I have had a look into this issue and i am unable to replicate your problem.

It is possible the problem is caused by a codec issue, what format are the video files? Are they using standard codecs?

I have built a small example program that runs a video in the main vi and pops up a second video when a button is pressed.

If you change the file path constants to the videos you are using and test them using the example program this will eliminate the video formats as an issue.

I have structured the ActiveX interface slightly differantly to how you described, however neither method re-created your problem.

Have a play with the example program and let me know what happens.

Best Regards

John Porter

Applications Engineer
National Instruments UK

[Ian Renton]

Thanks for the example - I changed to using your Invoke/Property nodes, and it now seems to work!

It's still very slow to load things (almost certainly due to my slow machine), so if my way of using the nodes worked for you, maybe it's just inefficient and took so long on my machine that I gave up before it had a change to work.