Music Visualizations with Windows Media Player (1 Viewer)

[nanook]

I am thinking about writing my own Windows Media Player visualization. Nothing special, just something to put my graphical experiments to use.

It's taken me a while to get a simple visualisation working in Windows Media Player 11. I would like to get it working in Media Portal before I spend any more time working on it, but I can't find a way to select it. I'd read that media portal has a plugins/visualization folder, but I do not have this.

Please can you advise me how I can use the config tool to select plugins other than Alchemy for WMP.

Thanks for Media Portal, it's the best,
Nanook

I've done some more research. I think what is happening is that MediaPortal is loading my plugin but is unable to bind to the interface. I've written my plugin in C# (COM Interop) and implemented the IWMPEffect and IWMPEffects2 interfaces.

I have a C# test harness that can also load the the Alchemy plugin and feed it random data to make it produce effects. This test harness can also load the C++ visualisations used by the Windows SDK visualisation wizard. The test harness cannot load my C# plugin via com unless it references it to point to the same implementation of the IWMPEffects interfaces. This is because .Net ignores the COM wrapper of my C# plugin object once it's loaded the assembly (It sees that the Interfaces are not the same instance - same assembly etc).

I think this may be why MediaPortal will not load my WMP plugin. May be it has the IWMPEffects interface with it and therefore it's not the same namespace as the ones I've implemented.

Does this sound correct? I would like one of the MediaPortal Devs to help if they have time.

Thanks,
Nanook

 

[nanook]

Re: Music Visualisations with Windows Media Player

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I worked around this by creating a light C++ plugin that loads the C# plugin and simply relays the data through. MediaPortal is happy to display my test visualisation this way.

I wonder if this approach could be used to load the other Windows Media Player plugin that won't show in MediaPortal.

Cheers,
Nanook