The Media Center Sandbox

I have two dll's integrated with VMC.  One is an MSAS sink that pushes the media information outwards and the other is an MCE background addin for control that accepts external commands.

I start media center and my monitor/control app and everything flows as expected from the sink to the external app.  I can adjust volume using the hard keys and I see the MSAS session reporting the changing volume and mute status.  So far, so good.

Now, if I issue a volume command via the background addin (which does AudioMixer.VolumeUp or VolumeDown as appropriate) the volume changes as expected.  However, the sink does not report the volume changes.  Now, if I use the hard keys, the volume changes but again, the sink does not report them.  All of the other sink events keep firing, so I see updated track names, times, etc.  It is just volume & mute events.

As soon as a new session starts, volume & mute are reported again.

This doesn't seem like an issue with my code, but I'd be curious if anyone else is seeing such an issue, or if there are some pointers of where to go to try to resolve the issue.

I've not seen that issue in similar work I've done, but I can't say I've worried about reporting volume back in the way you are.  However, welcome to the erratic world of MSAS!

You could try removing your sink and putting the basic sink in place (the one that just writes out to a file what was passed to MSAS) and see if you get the same issue.  At least you'll know that whether it's your sink or not that way.

Cheers,
Andrew

I would expect that it's probably a code path issue w/in MC.  You could try posting the key presses to the MC window to emulate hard key presses instead of using the SDK.

To expand on Andy's comments; welcome to the erratic world of MC development.

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babgvant.com

AndyC:

I've not seen that issue in similar work I've done, but I can't say I've worried about reporting volume back in the way you are.  However, welcome to the erratic world of MSAS!

You could try removing your sink and putting the basic sink in place (the one that just writes out to a file what was passed to MSAS) and see if you get the same issue.  At least you'll know that whether it's your sink or not that way.

Cheers,
Andrew

The same thing happens with the MSAS sink dll supplied with the SDK, so at least it isn't my code.

you could just get the system volume instead of using MSAS (which no one seems to support anymore).

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babgvant.com