Windows Media Centre Edition Plugin

[masb]

A plugin is now available to display media information from Microsoft Windows XP-MCE via LCD Smartie. This may be downloaded for free at http://www.axcis.com.au/shop/index.php? ... ducts_id=3.

[jeffery]

Nice!

[jeffery]

I actually cann't get this to work. MCIS does not seem to pick up any info from Media cEnter. Does this only work with any Australian version of MCE?

[masb]

MCIS is not restricted to the Australian version and should work with any version of MCE. It gets the information from MCE using Microsoft's Media State Aggregation Service and this needs to be registered properly and the PC restarted. The installation service should install and register this but if there are problems, check out that everything is correct. The Microsoft instructions are:

Installing an application which uses MediaState involves placing the three assemblies, MediaState.dll, MSASState.dll, and MemMapFile.dll on the computer and registering the managed MSASState COM sink. This section describes three ways to register the sink. Note that MSASState will not run until the machine is restarted after it has been registered.

Registry File
You can create a registry file (.reg) that contains the setup-specific information, and then pass the file to the Registry Editor (regedt32.exe). You can use the sample MSASState.reg file from the Prebuilt folder as a starting point, as shown in the following example.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSASState.MediaStatusSink]
@="MSASState.MediaStatusSink"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSASState.MediaStatusSink\CLSID]
@="{380AA9F1-5047-40D0-8BE9-18AB489CA469}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{380AA9F1-5047-40D0-8BE9-18AB489CA469}]
@="MSASState.MediaStatusSink"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{380AA9F1-5047-40D0-8BE9-18AB489CA469}\InprocServer32]
@="mscoree.dll"
"ThreadingModel"="Both"
"Class"="MSASState.MediaStatusSink"
"Assembly"="MSASState, Version=1.0.1740.26564, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=a097a53b6b26c493"
"RuntimeVersion"="v1.0.3705"
"CodeBase"="file:///(Path)/MSASState.DLL"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{380AA9F1-5047-40D0-8BE9-18AB489CA469}\ProgId]
@="MSASState.MediaStatusSink"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{380AA9F1-5047-40D0-8BE9-18AB489CA469}\Implemented Categories\{62C8FE65-4EBB-45E7-B440-6E39B2CDBF29}]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{380AA9F1-5047-40D0-8BE9-18AB489CA469}\Implemented Categories\{FCB0C2A3-9747-4c95-9d02-820AFEDEF13F}]
@="Media Status Sink"

It is important that the Assembly value?s Version string match the version of the MSASState.dll. The CodeBase value must match the installed location of the file in the following form:

file:///full_path

Installer
You can use a setup creation tool to generate a setup program or Windows Installer file. These tools provide registry setup capabilities that can match the registry entries described above.

REGASM
You can use the .NET Framework Assembly Registration Utility (REGASM.EXE) to register and unregister the COM server assembly. For example:

regasm.exe MsasState.dll /codebase

The problem with this approach is that it does not include the important additional registry entry that tells MSAS to use this sink. You will need to use one of the methods described previously to add this entry, which consists of the following data.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{380AA9F1-5047-40D0-8BE9-18AB489CA469}
\Implemented Categories\{FCB0C2A3-9747-4c95-9d02-820AFEDEF13F}]
@="Media Status Sink"

[jeffery]

I did get it to work by exiting mce before reinstalling it. It is working well now. I'm just learning the functions to customize it for smartie and my vfd. It looks good. Thank you for this!

[HuddaDudda]

I downloaded and tried getting this software to work without success. After everything is installed I did a reboot and I see MCIS in the taskbar - however when I right click on it and hit "restore" after refreshing it I can not get it to "see" my MP3 information with an MP3 playing in the background (all ID Tags are there an d showing properly in MCE). So is this a setup issue in the mcis.exe.config file? What specifically needs to be changed there? I am not running any firewalls.

[masb]

It looks like MCIS is not communicating properly with the MCE sink; try the work around explained in the thread http://www.axcis.com.au/bb/viewtopic.php?t=15. We will package this in for future releases.

[HuddaDudda]

I tried this method and still cant get it to work. It says that is was successfully registered and rebooted etc and still not info. I am trying MP3s that I had ripped from CDs I owned so I know the mp3 tags are good plus the covers and such are showing properly in MCE 2005. When I paste http://hostname:8421/mci/all into a IE browser I do see the XML and the info that is in the MCIS Control Screen (nav & title 1st two lines) is listed. Any other ideas? I never have installed Frontview just use LCD Smartie.

[gaga]

I had problems with this plugin until I downloaded and manually reinstalled the original .Net from www.microsoft.com. Now the plugin works perfectly fine, thank you very much, Mike! Wonderful job!

[HuddaDudda]

It appears after formatting and reinstalling a fresh clean version of MCE 2005 then installing this plugin it does work. I did install frontview (although never liked it nor used it) and uninstalled it before installing MCIS. I then did all the fixes posted to try and resolve the problem before doing a format and reinstall but with no success. So now everything is working good, now its time to tweak it.

[gaga]

Mike posted some "after Frontview" fixes on Axcis web site and they do work. But I have two unresolved issues: "duration" field is always 00:00 when playing the divx files. And I am looking for a field that shows recording status (the equivalent of the red circle icon in the Windows taskbar).

[HuddaDudda]

I did try all the posts about frontview and went to the forums there too without success. I followed each thing step by step to the "T". I will let you know if I find the recoding thing your looking for since MIKE is not very helpful regarding this plugin, even their forum has around 10 posts max about it with little to no info.

Also did you try the "playsym" tag? or possibly the "timerecording" might help what you are looking for.

[wilber]

Great plugin!
Can anyone tell me how to get function 5, (playText) to work properly?
When I use this I just get 2 blank chars on the LCD. (Using $dll(mci,5,,)

I can get the $dll(mci,1,playsym) to give a text version of the play state (->, >>, || etc), but I assume 5 should give a better looking symbol?

[torro]

Any chance someone else has this plugin? Not able to connnect with the Aussie server....


EDIT:
OK, I finally managed to DL the plugin. However....


I cannot get it to work

Is there a way to see if the modules is installed correctly? Should something be seen under local services?

Does it matter that other web servers are running? I am also using MCIS program guide application, and maybe this can cause a conflict?

Edit2: Well, it fixed itself. Got some problem getting my TVtuner to work properly, so I removed rollup 2 og reinstalled it again. As a bonus, MCIS is now working.

[jeffery]

I just wanted to say that since the initial problems I had, I've since done a reinstall of and MCIS works great! I'm now running MCE 2K5 R2 w/ .net 2.0 ad everything is fine. Thank you for this.

[masb]

MCIS Pro V2.1 is now available at http://www.axcis.com.au

[Nevertheless]

Because this plugin is shareware, but there seems to be no more engagement from the author (his forum is pretty much outdated - and inconsistent, because he states that MCIS v2.7 is ready for Vista, but only older versions are available for download on his site):

Does anyone know what's going on with the autor?

Or is there a similar MCE plugin for LCD Smartie that works under Vista?

[masb]

The latest is 2.15 available from http://www.axcis.com.au/bb/ezdloads.php. V2.15 is 8 releases on from 2.7. There has not been a new release for some time since I am concentrating on other work and it may be a while until a further release.