Question

I was trying to “just quickly integrate” the Windows Media Player via COM to play single files from the local file system or http sources – but due to the sparse documentation and online resources to its usage when not embedding into some kind of an Ole container, i couldn’t get that supposedly trivial use-case to work.

Initialization etc. works fine, but actually playing some file always fails.

Example code, starting with initialization (error handling stripped, basically translated from the C# example at MSDN, executed on the main thread):

CComPtr<IWMPPlayer> player;
player.CoCreateInstance(__uuidof(WindowsMediaPlayer), 0, CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER);
CComQIPtr<IWMPCore3> core(player);
CComPtr<IWMPControls> controls;
core->get_controls(&controls);
CComPtr<IWMPPlaylist> playlist;
core->get_currentPlaylist(&playlist);
CComBSTR path("c:\\bar.mp3"); // alternatively http://foo/bar.mp3

The first approach to play something gives “command not available”:

core->put_url(path);
// ... waiting after that for WMP to load doesn't make a difference
controls->play(); // returns 0x000D1105 - NS_S_WMPCORE_COMMAND_NOT_AVAILABLE

The second approach only produces S_OKs, but nothing is actually played:

CComPtr<IWMPMedia> media;
core->newMedia(path, &media);
playlist->appendItem(media);
controls->playItem(media); // returns S_OK, but doesn't play

Another thing i noted is that core->get_playState() always returns wmposMediaOpening, no matter how long i wait.

I’ve stumbled upon one thread that suggests multi-threading might not work properly with WMP and this code runs in a multi-threaded apartment. Might that be the problem?
If not, what else could be preventing WMP from playing the files?

Notable background:
The WMP instance is created in a DLL with a browser as the host-process.

Update:
Trying plain DirectShow, which WMP should be using itself, exhibits a more specific problem – see the question for that.

Answer 1

After further investigation, it turned out that this was actually caused by a VS2005 workaround for VS2008s AtlSetPerUserRegistration() which was always active – but should have been only for the contained COM servers registration/unregistration.

The workaround overrides HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE with HKEY_CURRENT_USER, which obviously results in quite some components failing if they are created in-process.