Play Mpg/WMV/etc. until completed, then close .exe -- A bit of help needed por favor

I'm writing a program called the Random Chronological Audio/Video Selection Device. What it will do is select files from certain folders in My Documents at random and play them on WMP, just like WMP will do if you set it to random; but on top of that I want to have the files selected also according to the time of the day, so that way I can wake up to Hey Arnold at 7am, be listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers at 12pm, and fall asleep to soothing rain drop music at 9pm. The program plays tracks all day one after another so there isn't a moment in which there isn't some sound coming out of my computer.

So far I've gotten the program to select random files from any destination and play them continuously, but I have to close WMP manually before the program continues on to the next track. How can I tell my program to close WMP after the track is completed, or how can the next track be selected without having to close WMP? Is there a way to do this just with C or do I have to use some sort of API?

Thanks in advance

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Originally Posted by Aeroflot

How can I tell my program to close WMP after the track is completed, or how can the next track be selected without having to close WMP? Is there a way to do this just with C or do I have to use some sort of API?

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The answer to this one is probably neither. I am not very familiar with windows (I remember WMP), but if you have a "kill" type command there you could apply that to the relevant instance of WMP.

Another idea would be to either find an app that accepts a list of tracks in a file to play (there are plenty), or write one yourself, which may not be that hard. Presuming it reads from the file at the end of each song (as opposed to loading the list all at once), you can then just add entries to it. Or, your program could just generate a list in the morning to supply to the media player. That is a very quick and simple thing to write; I've done something similar before -- in fact, that was what got me started programming.

Best of all would be to find a CLI player -- that is, one that does not require a GUI to run. Then you could just issue a command for each tune, eg "mediaplayer somesong.wav".

Neat idea, by the way. Could get trippy ;)

I looked up the CLI player and I didn't find one for Windows, but while I was searching I found out that WMP11 has command line support and can open, close, and play from that. It seems as though the problem might be solved. Thanks for the command line idea!

Does mplayer not have a Windows port? I'm sure it's sibling, mencoder does.

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Originally Posted by MK27

The answer to this one is probably neither. I am not very familiar with windows (I remember WMP), but if you have a "kill" type command there you could apply that to the relevant instance of WMP.

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Killing processes is bad. It doesn't give them a chance to clean up.
Instead, you should send a message to the main window to close (WM_CLOSE).

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Originally Posted by Elysia

Killing processes is bad. It doesn't give them a chance to clean up.
Instead, you should send a message to the main window to close (WM_CLOSE).

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Ah. In unix "kill" could be one of 64 different signals. The default is SIGTERM, which is fine if the process has cleaning up it wants to do atexit(). The more lethal SIGKILL may circumvent that possibility, I'm not sure.

Anyway, it was the general concept I was referring to. Afterthot: how would you end a process that does not have a window, in windows?

Ah, Linux is pretty different from Windows.
If the process has no window and is not a service, then you can only terminate the process. Windows has no other way (and that is a rather poor oversight if you ask me).

SIGTERM can be caught by the application to allow it to do some cleanup, then exit voluntarily. SIGKILL cannot be caught, and will kill the application immediately and unconditionally.

I remember seeing, in the shutdown sequence of a few Linux distributions, the system first sends SIGTERM to all processes, and then SIGKILL after a few seconds to kill the remining ones.

It appears like mplayer DOES have a Windows port.

MPlayer - The Movie Player

It's one of the (probably THE) most popular command line media player on Linux. Eats just about all formats under the sun. To run it

Code:

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mplayer movie.mpg

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.

It will make a new Window to play the video, and close the window (and kill itself) after the video finishes playing (for audio files, it won't make a window).

The only version of WMP that worked with the open-and-close-after-playing option was 6.4, and that didn't work out. For some reason if WMP stayed open without closing, my program would pause and wait for me to close WMP; but after I added /play /close to the command, my program just opened infinite amounts of WMP windows. So I'm going to try mplayer this time and see how that works.