The Media Center Sandbox

A section in the MC SDK docs mentions that playlists in ASX or WPL format can be played in Media Center.

I've tried to create a playlist file in ASX format with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<smil>
   <media id="v1" src="s:\Videos\Bear.wmv" />
   <media id="v2" src="s:\Videos\Butterfly.wmv" />
</smil>

 I saved the file as 'c:\temp\playlist.asx'. How do I then get Media Center to play it? I tried:

MediaCenterEnvironment.PlayMedia(Microsoft.MediaCenter.MediaType.Video, 
   @'c:\temp\playlist.asx', false);

but this gave me an error saying it couldn't find the file. 's:' is a mapped drive with a copy of the sample videos on it. Has anyone had any luck playing playlists?

Thanks for any pointers.

Glenn.

Hi,

I had some similar issues with playing videos - and found I needed to convert the mapped paths back into UNC paths before I could access files in a lot of cases (in fact .NET code reqiures this as well if you are using System.IO). I'm not sure if the technique I'm using is kosher - but i was able to extract the mapped path UNC's from the registry without having to resort to Win32 calls..

So if you access the playlist as  \\othermachine\s\videos\playlist.asx..   - then you can just have relative paths inside the playlist. (so you don't need to hardcode paths in the playlist - which would make it a pain to manage later on)..

Niall

 

 

The drive mapping I'm using is actually mapped to a virtual disk rather than a network path. Are you saying I still need to play the list by passing a full UNC path to the file?

I'm not worried about having absolute paths within the playlist as the file is created on the fly just before playing.

Do the paths within the playlist also have to be UNC paths?

Thanks.
Glenn

I have no problem in playing a playlist for streaming medias by using the playmedia function.

And here's what I found regarding the media file path.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/introwmmeta.aspx