The Microsoft® Windows® Media Player control exposes methods and properties for manipulating multimedia playback from a Web page or application. The main features of Windows Media Player include:
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The ability to create custom user interfaces on top of the Windows Media Player control. Buttons, boxes, and menus can be incorporated into an HTML page for controlling playback.
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DVD-Video playback functions, such as start, stop, pause, fast-forward, rewind, mute, volume adjustment, and menus.
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Retrieving information about the DVD-Video title, such as the number of titles, chapters, audio streams, camera angles and subpicture streams.
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An HTML page can be designed to respond to event messages created by the Windows Media Player control. Events that cause the control to create an event message include the following:
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Warnings and errors encountered by Windows Media Player.
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Changes in the playback state, such as from a play state to a paused state.
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Keyboard and mouse input.
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Windows Media Player is also provided as a stand-alone player application based on the same technology as the Windows Media Player control. However, the control enables you to create a user interface unique to your content, to process any type of script commands, and to integrate multimedia presentations into larger Web applications. It also provides a large selection of DVD specific methods, properties and events to allow precise playback control of content from a DVD-Video disc.
The OBJECT tag is used to embed the Windows Media Player control into an HTML page. DVD-specific properties and methods are passed to the Microsoft Windows Media Player control DVD property, which then resolves to a MediaPlayer object. An event code executes when an event occurs. An event is an action, recognized by the DVD object, for which you can write code to respond. Events can be generated by a user action, such as clicking the mouse or pressing a key on the keyboard. Events are also generated by the system itself, for example, in the case of timers.
Enhanced DVD applications, including Web pages that control DVD playback, can be created in HTML using the Windows Media Player ActiveX control. DirectShow provides all the filters necessary to navigate and play DVD-Video except the MPEG-2 and AC-3 decoders. To play DVD-Video content using an HTML application based on DirectShow, users must have installed on their system a third-party hardware or software DVD decoder that is DirectShow-compatible.
Additional details on how to use the Windows Media Player Active X control to create Enhanced DVD titles can be found in the Microsoft Interactive DVD Toolkit Software Developers Kit, which can be obtained directly from Microsoft.
