Summary: The AxWMPLib.AxWindowsMediaPlayer object seems to have bugs and becomes unstable.

Question:  Is there a bug on the Active X wrapper that is generated by Visual Studio?  Do anyone know of a workaround?

Background:
I am using an embedded Windows Media Player in a form.  I got the player onto the from via the VS Designer. 

The instance of the player object is of type AxWMPLib.AxWindowsMediaPlayer m_player.

When I set the URL property (e.g. m_player.URL = "c:\my_wav_file.wav" ) the player starts playing but then after a few seconds the progress bar of the player jumps back to the beginning and becomes grey (disabled) although the audio keeps playing.  Once the position marker got into the disabled state if you click on it the audio starts playing from the begining.

If you keep repeating the process of assigning new wav files to the URL property after some stage the player object crash.

The only code I wrote myself other than what was created by the VS Designer, was to set the URL.


Any help or suggested on the following questions will be appreciated:
Is this a known problem?  
Do anyone knows of a workaround?  
Will this be fixed after the beta? 
Is there a different way of using the Media Player by not using the VS Active X wrapper?

At this stage, the only way to get stable playback working from VS 2005 beta 2 is to not use the URL method of the media player object, but instead launch the Media player window by calling the <openPlayer> method.  Unfortunally then, you don't have any programmatic control over the playback since it runs as a seperate application. 

As things are now you can't develop a serious media application with VS 2005.

Product Versions:
- VS 2005 beta 2
- Windows Media Player 10
- Windows XP

The bug was reported atthe MSDN feedback center.

Microsoft responded with the following feedback regarding the bug report (2005-07-06 ):

"We have been able to repro this issue and are investigating."

"This issue appears to be related to a bug in the Windows Media Player control and not to the Active X wrapper. Because of this there isn't anything we can change on our code to cause it to work better."

This error means that Windows Media Player can't be used in VS .Net applications as an embedded control.

In summary the behaviour for this bug:

• The player starts playing.
• The position control start moving.
• After a few seconds the position marker stops although the player continues to play.
• If you click on the position marker the audio start playing from the start and the position marker stays stuck at the beginning while the player is playing.

Question:

Can anyone please help to send this bug to the right person at Microsoft?

I have seen this problem before playing movie files in Windows Media Player itself. I have always had the feeling that it had something to do with the movie file, but i know nothing about media file formats, so I wouldnt know how to go about figuring that out.

Unfortunately, I cant find a place to report bugs in WMP. Any of the MS gurus here know where to report this kind of thing?

Is this bug fixed now (10/24/2006)?

Icannot build "AxWMPLib.AxWindowsMediaPlayer m_player".

VS could not find such references: ComLib, WMPLib, OcxControls, and AxWMPlib.

Thanks.

I don't think jsre is revering to the same problem.

I veried that the same bug exists when Media Player Control version 11 is used.

The bugs behaviour:

I'm seeing the same thing with MPG files from a Sony W70 camera (video files from the camera). I have a 40 second video that plays fine on Nero, but when using Windows Media Player, the video stops 1/4th the way through but the audio keeps going. What's odd is that when Windows Media Player loads the file, it only recognizes it to be the length at which it stops... ie, even though it stop 25% of the way through, the video bar doesn't reflect that. It reflects that it played 100% of the video... but the audio keeps playing for another minute which is very odd.

Any clues?

-ken

I embedded wmp in a web page

script was player.openplayer(URL)

make sure that the wmpAx is in pause then you can click the event

for the external player