Enumerating and using wmp visualizers

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+1 Q:

Enumerating and using wmp visualizers

Hi!

I want to use the systems available windows media player visualizers in my app. Apperently visualizers expose an IWMPEffects interface to the world. My question is how do I enumerate and create instances to the available visualizers on my system? Probably it's just a process of getting the cslid of the visualizers and then create the instance with CoCreateInstance. However I have no idea how to get these clsid's!

Thanks!

+1 A:

The CLSIDs of the objects that implement IWMPEffects are stored as subkeys of HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Objects\Effects.

Lorenzo 2010-05-31 11:45:22

I think you're on the right track, the info is definitely in the registry. However I only found one reference to visualizer and that's the "Viz plugin". I think this plugin looks up the installed visualizers in another place.I have installed a viz which resides in "Pulsing.dll". A quick search for it in regedit gets me the clsid, but I have not been able to trace where this clsid comes from! Maybe use some tool to see what windows media player are pulling from the registry at startup?

monoceres 2010-05-31 12:18:29

Mmm the CLSID of the various visualizer have to be somewhere in the registry, otherwise WMP should enumerate the entire HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID, and that's not viable! However the key I provided in the answer was the most logical place...If I remember correctly, also Windows Media Center uses the same visualizations, and as it is a .net application, you could check with Reflector ;)

Lorenzo 2010-05-31 12:25:52

I got it! Used process monitor from sysinternals to monitor what keys wmp read, searched for my known clsid and bang! Found that the visualizers are stored in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Objects\EffectsIf you edit your post to reflect this revelation I'm tagging it as the solution ;)

monoceres 2010-05-31 16:17:38

Well done! Of course the answer seems so logical when you've discovered it! I edited the answer to reflect the correct registry key.

Lorenzo 2010-06-01 12:06:02

ansaurus

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Enumerating and using wmp visualizers

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