How to play a DVD from DVD-ROM using labview (play,pause,stop).

[Scott E.]

Hey Charlie,   that actually works with a DVD file - sans navigation.  I am concerned for the long term though as this is definitely a Rube Goldberg type of solution which might be more likely to be problematic in the future for my client.  Is National Instruments going to address this problem directly in the next major release of Labview or possibly in an interim minor release?

Thanks,

Scott

[Scott E.]

Hi Charlie,

As I feared, the solution you put forth - while creative - isn't entirely reliable.  I find that it will run the first time I try it, but then if I shut down Labview altogether and then start it up again it will fail.  Sometimes if I add a probe on the block diagram it will start working again.  If I can get it to work again, it will usually be reliable until I shut down Labview and start it up again.  When it fails, the Variant To Data functions will spit out a null ref num which causes it to crash - sometimes in the initialization, sometimes not until a play, etc. command is given.  Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Scott

[Charlie S.]

It sounds like there is a problem with the internet explorer activex control. I have not run into these before myself -- what version of IE are you using? I've tried playing around with this a bit more, but unfortunately our options are limited right now. R&D is aware of the issues around WMP 9 & 10, but we have to live with them for now. One other option I could think of would be to create your own activeX control in VB6 that is essentially a wrapper around the WMP10 ActiveX control. I haven't tried this, so I can't guarantee it will work.

The other option would then be to use a different ActiveX DVD player. There are lots of players out there on the web, and I'm sure many of them have ActiveX interfaces. I'm just not sure how much money (if any) they would cost.