List Media Player

Program

List Media Player is one of the first programs I made.  It is simply a way of browsing through your drives and folders to find media files to play - either sound or video.  The actual player is on a separate Form, which allows for free resizing.

Due to several people asking for the source code, I decided to write this page to explain how the program was made.  You can also look at the source code in this file:

vb_48_listmediaplayer.zip (5.34 KB)

This project uses two ActiveX controls - Windows Media Player (msdxm.ocx) and Allen OCX (allenocx.ocx).  If you do not have the Windows Media Player control, you will need to download and install Windows Media Player 6.4 (3.42 MB) from Microsoft.  If you are running Windows XP, you should already have this installed.  Allen OCX should be put onto the first Form.

The rest of the controls on the first Form are a FileListBox (called Files), a DirListBox (called Folders), a DriveListBox (called Drives), a ComboBox (called cmbFileTypes) and a CheckBox (called chkRepeat).  You can change the appearance of the controls to match the following screenshot if you wish:

The List Media Player Form

This Form has its BorderStyle property set to 1 - Fixed Single and the MinButton property set to True.

If you want to create the Help menu, the menu items are as follows:

The List property of the cmbFileTypes ComboBox contains the following text:

*
aif
aifc
aiff
All types
asf
asx
au
avi
m1v
m3u
mid
mov
mp2
mp3
mpa
mpe
mpeg
mpg
qt
ra
ram
rm
rmi
rmm
snd
wav

The second Form looks like this:

The second List Media Player Form containing the Windows Media Player Control

There is one control on this Form - a Windows Media Player Control called Videoscreen.  The Form itself is called frmVideoform.

Back to the first Form; the code in the Form_Load event is as follows:

Firstly, settings are retrieved from the registry - the value of chkRepeat, the ListIndex property of the cmbFileTypes ComboBox and the Path of the Folders control.  If an error occurs when trying to do this, default values are set.

The code to browse though the DriveListBox and DirListBox is as follows:

If an error occurs when attempting to access a drive, this error is trapped and the Drive is set to the drive that contains the program i.e. App.Path.

When the user clicks on the cmbFileTypes ComboBox, this sets the Pattern property of the FileListBox.  If 'All types' is chosen, the FileListBox displays all the file types that can be played:

Compatible files are played when the user clicks on a file in the FileListBox:

When the FileName property of the Windows Media Player control (Videoscreen) is set, it starts playing automatically.

Here is the code for the Help menu items and the Click event for chkRepeat:

If chkRepeat is detected as being checked, the Windows Media Player control is set to repeat the song by setting the PlayCount property to 0.

When the program closes, frmVideoform is unloaded and settings are saved to the registry:

Here is the code for the second Form.  In the Form_Load event, the Form is set to being the topmost above other windows by using the TopMost method of the Allen control:

Comments

Martin Allen 1999 - 2008.  Last updated Wednesday 21 May 2008 09:26:11 PM +0100.