The Media Center Sandbox

Hello,

I'm writing a Perl script to automate simple Windows Media Center tasks, like playing mp3's and avi files.  Anybody have examples?

Thanks.

~Henry~

Ive been coding in perl for over 10 years so I'm sure I could help but what exactly are you talking about?  You want to try to use OLE automation for this?  Or what exact angle are you talking about?

Yes.  I want to use OLE/COM.

I've seen lots of examples using OLE/COM programs to automate Excel...   but none for Media Center.

Thanks!

I don't think you can do what you are thinking of doing. You could make an application to run PERL scripts FROM Media Center, but there's very little you can do to actually 'automate' Media Center, unless you want to generate keystrokes and/or mouse movements.

But there is potential for things like file conversion, getting data etc. using PERL scripts (loading data from PERL scripts is the next feature I'm adding to Yougle). You'd have to do that by executing the scripts (and the PERL interpreter) from your C# code.

By redirecting the text output, you could construct progress bars, informational displays etc. But there would have to be a reasonable amount of C# / MCML code to support your PERL.

To specifically answer your question, Media Center doesn't expose an OLE/COM automation interface in the way that Excel does. 

Cheers,
Andrew