zPlayer - My own little audio/video player

[CYCho]

I have uploaded the latest version of WINMM.DLL-based media player in my first post and I think I personally prefer this one to zPlayer. It is really simple but has most of the functions zPlayer has. At least this one is better than zPlayer in transition of video when moving to a new file or toggling between pause and play. Any suggestion for improvement would be most welcome.

[CYCho]

It seems that I cannot turn a video window to fullscreen mode in winmm.dll. The best I can do is to maximize the video with WinSetState($hVideo, "", @SW_MAXIMIZE), command. This fills up the entire client area of the Windows, with the task bar and title bar still showing. Moreover, the source aspect ratio is ignored in the maximized state. Any suggestion on how to get a proper fullscreen mode would be greatly appreciated.

Edited April 14 by CYCho

[ioa747]

check if this help

topic/210078-full-screen-gui/

Edited April 14 by ioa747

[CYCho]

7 hours ago, ioa747 said:

check if this help

Thanks for your attention. I applied your code snippet to my project, but it didn't do the trick. The problem is the video window is created by winmm.dll, not by me, and GUI... commands do not seem to have any effect on a third-party window. WinMove() command is effective on the video window, but there is no Win... command to change the style of a third-party window. I tried to direct the video to my own GUI, but then, the video could not be stretched.

Thanks again!

[TheXman]

21 hours ago, CYCho said:

It seems that I cannot turn a video window to fullscreen mode in winmm.dll....Any suggestion on how to get a proper fullscreen mode would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure if this is still an issue for you, but if it is, then I have found that the following works for me on Windows 7 & 10.  I haven't tested it on any other OS versions.

As you can see on the MCI Play command page, you can use the "fullscreen" flag to play compressed video in fullscreen mode.  When I added the flag to the "play" command, my video was played in fullscreen and stretched to the appropriate dimensions.

I just changed the line that initiates the playing of the video from ...

mciSendString("play myMedia")

TO

mciSendString("play myMedia fullscreen")

Hopefully, it works for you too. 

 

P.S.

To toggle between fullscreen and normal, you should be able to just reissue the play command with appropriate "from" position, with or without the "fullscreen" flag, as needed.

 

Edited April 15 by TheXman

[CYCho]

6 hours ago, TheXman said:

you can use the "fullscreen" flag to play compressed video in fullscreen mode

Thanks for your response. I feel like I'm a blind man touching an elephant. I read about fullscreen mode and I tried and failed. I didn't understand what the compressed video meant. I even "compressed" an mp4 file at a website from 3324KB to 1732KB, but it didn't work. I use about 20 different video files to test my project in mp4, webm and flv formats, Big_Buck_Bunny.webM being my favorite. Upon reading your suggestion, I just tested the code with an mp4 file I never used before, and it did play in fullscreen mode. I tested some of my other files including mkv and avi files and they also played in full screen mode. I have been testing with wrong files all the time. The problem is I still don't know how to differentiate a "compressed" file from non-compressed. I hope I can differentiate them by a file property value.

I will consider my problem solved, though. Thanks again.

Edited April 15 by CYCho

[CYCho]

On 4/15/2023 at 2:06 PM, CYCho said:

I hope I can differentiate them by a file property value.

I could not find any file property value significantly different between the files that stretch to fullscreen well and the files that randomly fail to stretch.  For those that fail, I had to issue "fullscreen" command more than once to make it fullscreen. I have uploaded the latest version of winmm.dll-based media player in the first post.

Edit: I must say it was a discovery. Some video files don't play in fullscreen mode from the start even though I send "play myMedia fullscreen". After many trials and errors I found the following code doing the trick. The fullscreen command should be preceded by a normal play command. Unless I add "from 0" in the fullscreen command, a file will always be played from about 15 seconds from the starting position. I don't know why, but this code works.

I uploadded the latest version of my WINMM.DLL Media Player as an independent example code.
 

mciSendString("play myMedia")
mciSendString("play myMedia fullscreen from 0")

 

Edited April 18 by CYCho

[CYCho]

I uploaded version 5.0.0.0 of zPlayer in the download section of this forum.

I went back to WMPlayer.OCX embedded in IE. I compared 3 different options for playing digital media files which I could use for my media player. The first option was Windows Media Player(WMP) embedded in IE, which was used in versions 2 and 3 of zPlayer. The 2nd option was WMP object linked with ObjCreateInterface function to enable resizing of video without an IE. This option seemed attractive when there were fears of IE being dropped from Windows anytime soon. I adopted this option in version 4 of zPlayer. The 3rd option was winmm.dll, a Windows multimedia library for general programming purpose. I made a bare-bone media player with this method and uploaded it in AutoIt Example Scripts forum. All 3 options showed very similar funtionalities for playback of audio files, but they were significantly different from each other in playback of video files, especially as regards to resizing and fullscreen mode, and the first option, IE-embedded WMP, was by far the best option. Compared to the first option, the 2nd option showed unsatifactory performance in transition of video frames between pause and play. The 3rd option showed poor perforamnce in transition to fullscreen mode. And the fullscreen mode did not have a built-in video control and did not allow me to overlay my own video control on the screen. In the meantime I upgraded my OS to Windows 11 and, unlike my worries, I had no problem in running IE-embedded WMP object and it became clear that Windows will support IE untill the end of 2029. So I decided to go back to IE-embedded WMP. By the end of 2029, I hope a new method will be available which is comparable to, or better than, IE-embedded WMP.

[CYCho]

The latest version did away with IE_embedded WMP and used winmm.dll instead.  Winmm.dll allows much more flexibility in resizing the video, including maximizing and stretching to fullscreen. Please visit here for the latest version.

Edited August 8 by CYCho

[CYCho]

I found that the lengths of some media files varied depending on which method I used to get them. In my zPlayer I use 2 methods: Shell.Aplication object and "status MyMedia length" command string with winmm.dll. I would accept a difference of a couple of seconds, but not several tens of seconds. Sometimes, one was more than two times of the other. Almost always, winmm.dll method produced longer length than shell application method and the length obtained by winmm.dll method was wrong.  I don't know where this difference comes from, but my understanding is that these files have meta data messed up somewhere. Always I could eliminate the difference by replacing the media file with a new one. If you want to check if your files are OK, you can use the following code:
 

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#include <File.au3>
#include <Array.au3>

$sFileTypes = "*.mp3;*.wma;*.asf;*.ogg;*.ape;*.flac;*.mp4;*.wmv;*.avi;*.mkv;*.flv;*.webM"
$sFolder = "D:\Video"
$aFiles = _FileListToArrayRec($sFolder, $sFileTypes, 1, 1, 1, 1)
;   _ArrayDisplay($aFiles)

$hDLL = DllOpen("winmm.dll")
$oShellApp = ObjCreate("Shell.Application")
$iGetDetailsOf = 27 ; 27 is for Windows 10 and 11. Other OS versions may have different column number.

For $i = 1 To $aFiles[0]
    $sFile = $sFolder & "\" & $aFiles[$i]

    $sFileName = StringMid($sFile, StringInStr($sFile, "\", 0, -1)+1)
    $sDir = StringLeft($sFile, StringInStr($sFile, "\", 0, -1))
    $oDir = $oShellApp.NameSpace($sDir)
    $oFile = $oDir.Parsename($sFileName)
    $Length1 = $oDir.GetDetailsOf($oFile, $iGetDetailsOf)
    $Length1 = StringLeft($Length1,2)*3600+StringMid($Length1, 4, 2)*60+StringRight($Length1,2)

    mciSendString("open """ & $sFile & """ alias myMedia1 type MPEGVideo")
    mciSendString("set myMedia1 time format milliseconds")
    $Length2 = mciSendString("status myMedia1 length")
    mciSendString("close myMedia1")
    $Length2 = Int($Length2/1000)

    If Abs($Length1-$Length2) >= 5 Then
        ConsoleWrite($sFile & @TAB & $Length1 & @TAB & $Length2 & @CRLF)
;       FileDelete($sFile)
    EndIf
Next
DllClose($hDLL)

Func mciSendString($string)
    Local $aRet = DllCall($hDLL, "int", "mciSendStringW", "wstr", $string, "wstr", "", "int", 65534, "hwnd", 0)
    If Not @error Then Return $aRet[2]
EndFunc

 

[CYCho]

Multi-File Repeat Function

One of my favorite music folders holds 539 classical titles. While listening to this folder, sometimes I feel like repeating several files, Beethoven's Symphony 9, movements 1 to 4, for example. zPlayer Version 6.0.0.7 makes this possible. One of the challenges I encountered in this version was coloring the selected items in the playlist.

The easiest way was using GUICtrlSetColor() or GUICtrlSetBkColor() function, but they had flickering problem: a colored playlist would randomly flicker, whch was pretty much annoying. I wanted to realize the function wihtout using a UDF which is not a part of standard AutoIt installation. So GUIListViewEx.au3 was out of my consideration. Then I found a solution here, @LarsJ's, so called, virtual listview. It perfectly fit my requirement and it worked great. Loading speed was far faster than _GUICtrlListView_AddArray() and flickering diappeared.

Please take a look at what I have done in zPlayer Version 6.0.0.7.

Note: Virtual listview was not that simple. I had to make several changes to my code to work correctly with virtual listview, and I assigned a new version number of 6.0.0.8. - September 12, 2023

Edited September 13 by CYCho

[CYCho]

What happens when I choose a folder that contains media files not only in the folder itself but also in its subfolders? In the past, zPlayer had no option but to include all files from both the main and subfolders. However, with version 6.0.0.9, it informs me about the number of files present and provides an option to either include or exclude files from the subfolders. Also implemented in version 6.0.0.9 is the display of current file name in the tooltip of zPlayer icon on Windows taskbar. To ensure this feature works properly, all additional GUIs had to be created as a child of the main GUI. This change had an unexpected advantage: all open GUIs can be hidden or displayed by just one click on the icon in the taskbar.