Windows Media Player ActiveX not playing image, but WMP stand alone application does. Why?

[stha]

I use my Windows Media Player v11 with additional codec to play mp4 files (mp4 are not supported by default with WMP 11, so I had to install a codec). It works fine in the stand alone application, but when I use the ActiveX control in NI, it does not use the codec and I get only the sound... no image. I thought the ActiveX was simply an interface to the same core application used by NI and the stand alone media player. And if it is the same core, it should use the same codec. What am I missing?

[Coq_Rouge · Accepted solution]

I have a tip for you. If you download Quicktime 7(QT), you may select the QT activex player(see picture). It plays mp4 and looks better. And QT is free so it should not any problem. Try and see if it do you any good 😉

[smercurio_fc]

This comes up a lot. The ActiveX interface is flaky, at best. In principle, the ActiveX interface should work like the core application, but in practicality it doesn't. It is highly dependent on the version of Windows Media Player and the version of LabVIEW. What version of LabVIEW are you using? Is this a main VI or a subVI (there's been issues with this as well). Is the VI configured as a "dialog"? If you post your VI as well as a link to an mp4 file someone else can try it for you.

Or, you can follow the alternate advice of using a real media player. 

[stha]

It works with QT. The problem with this player (or the file?) is when I use large files (70MBytes for example) and try to set the start time 5 of 10 minutes ahead. It takes forever to seek. It is working if I seek few seconds ahead only. The same file, when played with the stand alone WMP 11, can seek anywhere and there is no lag at all. Could it be the file that does not comply correctly to the mp4 standard? The file was recorded using this product: http://www.haivision.com/products/oscar/ and the encoding is done with MPEG-4 AVC H.264.

[stha]

Just for the records...

 - WMP11.0

 - LabVIEW 8.5

 - No sub-VI used in my tests

[stha]

At the end, we were able to have Windows Media Player 11 to work properly with LabVIEW 8.5.

Use the following example: WMA.vi

Re-install the codecs: ffdshow (fork)

 - download

 - Installation instructions

It now works fine for me. People say the decoding is not as clear as in QT, but now I can seek and WMP takes only a fraction of a second to resume playback at the desired position.