Differences between ActiveX and standalone

[Troberg]

I've been playing around with the ActiveX for a while and it's really quite nice.

I do however have problems playing some files which the standalone plays just fine. Are there differences in how codecs are used between them? Any suggestions?

Also, some more events to tell me what's going on would be nice. At the moment, when I tell it to load and start a file, it will be a while before it can tell me about the file (length and such), but it does not tell me when that information is available, so I have to poll for changes. Also, an event to tell me that the end is reached would be nice.

It goes back to showing the cone for a split second when switching files. I understand that you want to show that it is your control that is being used, but I would very much like to be able to set the background colour, as the current white background tend to flash a bit much when shown for a split second.

These are all minor problems (although I find the first one a bit annoying), overall it is an excellent product. Just a few more small fixes and it will be perfect.

[Quovodis]

I do however have problems playing some files which the standalone plays just fine. Are there differences in how codecs are used between them? Any suggestions?

no there are absolutely no difference b/w the 2, both apps uses the same library for accessing and playing MRLs. can you be a bit more specific ?

Also, some more events to tell me what's going on would be nice. At the moment, when I tell it to load and start a file, it will be a while before it can tell me about the file (length and such), but it does not tell me when that information is available, so I have to poll for changes. Also, an event to tell me that the end is reached would be nice.

the activex control does not currently integrate with VLC playlist management particularily well, which explains the lack of events, this is on the TODO list

It goes back to showing the cone for a split second when switching files. I understand that you want to show that it is your control that is being used, but I would very much like to be able to set the background colour, as the current white background tend to flash a bit much when shown for a split second.

try playing with the visible property, make it invisible, start playing, wait a short time, make it visible

[Troberg]

no there are absolutely no difference b/w the 2, both apps uses the same library for accessing and playing MRLs. can you be a bit more specific ?

I have no real clues except that they play fine in the standalone, but is sound and cone only in the ActiveX. It is a fairly large percentage of files, so I doubt it's just an occassional file error.

Am I missing some property that allows it to use external codecs or something (btw, for some reason, not all properties/methods show up in VB6 intellisense)?

try playing with the visible property, make it invisible, start playing, wait a short time, make it visible

I've already tried that, I've even tried hiding it behind a black overlay, but without the events mentioned above, timing of this is a pain in the ass. I'll just wait for them. It's not like I'm on a schedule with this, I'm just playing around, modifying an old screen saver I made years ago to work with video files.

[Quovodis]

I have no real clues except that they play fine in the standalone, but is sound and cone only in the ActiveX. It is a fairly large percentage of files, so I doubt it's just an occassional file error.

if the cone is showing when playing, it either means that there is no video to play (fairly obvious) or there was an error creating a vout.
please note that the activex plugin will also use the saved preferences, just like the player. so you may need to tweak some video options to get some positive result. My first advise would be to disable overlay rendering, also try using wingdi rather than directx, there could be limitations in the video card.

you can use the logger interface to track debug messages from the activex plugin.

[Troberg]

Thanks, will try that.

[Troberg]

Disabling the overlay worked nicely.

I'm not that surprised when I think of it, as I ran VLC on another monitor at the same time and two overlays at the same time may be a stupid idea...

If I get around to cleaning up the source of my screen saver, I'll post it somewhere so that others may benefit. At the moment, however, it is a mess of old stuff, inherited from several generations of older screen savers with the graphical stuff jerked out and replaced with new stuff while retaining the screen saver shell parts. Lets just say that it works, but I'm not proud of the code...