AutoHotkey Community

[Ron1]

Using, as a model, Lexikos excellent script on playing a specific track on a CD-ROM in Windows Media Player 11, I am making a second effort to retrieve the play state of WMP 11 for another purpose, but still unsuccessfully. Any thoughts on where I am going wrong would be gratefully received.

I always get 0 [= undefined] for the play state, no matter what the actual play state. Sean kindly suggested that the play state may only be retrievable if initially set with COM, so I attempted to do that first, which I unfortunately failed to do, so my test for a functioning play state thereafter is not meaningful.

In the first part of the following code, I have extracted the key commands from Lexikos model, and show that they work, to get the number of CD-ROM drives on the computer (1) and to get the number of tracks on the loaded CD (14), both of which are correct results. Then I go on to invoke a "property" called "playState" that the MSDN documentation (URL below) lists as parallel to the property "cdromCollection". Because of that parallel relationship, I use script parallel to that used with cdromCollection. But while cdromCollection works, playState does not work. [My thanks to "Guest" for pointing me to playState.]

I use the hot key P to trigger the routine, so that I can be in Windows Media Player 11, with a CD playing or not, when I hit the P.

[Chris]

I think there is some kind of glitch in phpBB that prevented the post above from being visible. I've edited its final URL a little and now the entire post is visible.

[Sean]

What I meant was that you must start playing the CDRom from the created wmp. Please try again after replacing your first playState := COM_Invoke(wmp, "playState") with

[engunneer]

[Ron1]

Sean,

Thank you again for the effort to help. I am most grateful.

I modified my code, as you suggested, as shown below. But, unfortunately, I got the same result. That is, playState = 0 always.

Further, as the annotations in the code below indicate, the CD player did not start.

I noted, too, that if I placed "Result :=" in front of the following line

COM_Invoke(wmp, "currentPlaylist", "+" playlist)

to form

Result := COM_Invoke(wmp, "currentPlaylist", "+" playlist)

then Result returned a null. I am not sure if that is significant, since no return value from this COM_Invoke is utilized by the code.

[Sean]

[Ron1]

Sean,

Thank you alerting me to the update needed for the COM Standard Library. That worked. I am most grateful for your help.

Two questions:

(1) Why is there a period (.) after the "+" in your example

COM_Invoke(Object, "Function", "+" . ObjPrm)

on the COM Standard Library thread:

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic22923.html&highlight=com+standard+library

The example that you sent to me earlier in this thread did not contain that period (.)

COM_Invoke(wmp, "currentPlaylist", "+" playlist)

and adding that period did defeat operation. Perhaps it has a different significance.

(2) Could you embed the date in the header of the COM.ahk file of future versions of the COM Standard Library? That would facilitate checking that date later.

Progress to date in using playState

While I have gotten three examples (discussed below) of the use of playState to work with a hidden version of Windows Media Player 11, I have not yet figured out how to get the playState of the normal, visible version of Windows Media Player 11.

My hope was to read the playState of the normal, visible version of Windows Media Player 11 and to monitor it. With that capability, I could determine when playing actually begins, so that other actions could be triggered at the right moment. This is particularly helpful when Internet radio and Internet TV stations, with long buffering times, are being accessed.

I have also not yet found a way to feed the URL of a desired Internet radio station or Internet television station directly into the normal, visible version of the Windows Media Player. I can, of course, feed that URL in using ^u to activate the "Open URL" menu and then SendInput to send the individual keystrokes of the URL; but I was hoping for a more direct method.

Three successful examples using playState

The following three scripts provide successful examples of retrieving the playState of a hidden version of Windows Media Player 11, running under Windows XP. Perhaps these examples will prove helpful to other users.

(1) This first script gathers certain data about the CD-ROM drives and the CD-ROM in the first such drive, then evokes a hidden version of the Windows Media Player to play that CD-ROM, and then monitors the evolution of playState of that hidden version, once a second for five seconds. I have documented this script internally.

[engunneer]

Re: (1):
the period is the technical operator for concatenate. It is somewhat optional, and AHK is fine without it.

[Ron1]

Thank you, engunneer. I will explore that concatenate operator.

Ron1