TC New DirectShow media player - supported file extensions

[deus-ex]

How do you control which file extensions are considered by TC's new DirectShow media player? Currently, it lacks support for the following multimedia file extensions .FLAC, .FLV, .MID, .OGG, .OPUS and .WEBM.

For example, the TC lister plugin Multimedia Player allows defining of the file extensions to be recognized via ini-directive.

[Horst.Epp]

How do you control which file extensions are considered by TC's new DirectShow media player? Currently, it lacks support for the following multimedia file extensions .FLAC, .FLV, .MID, .OGG, .OPUS and .WEBM.

For example, the TC lister plugin Multimedia Player allows defining of the file extensions to be recognized via ini-directive.

FLV is just a MP4 file.
If I rename an flv to mp4 it plays without problems with the DirectShow media player.

[DrShark]

Since it's discussed in a new separate topic, I'm moving my post from here.

How do you control which file extensions are considered by the new DirectShow media player?

For VfW player, as far as I understand, extensions are listed in Registry:

It depends on the configuration. TC calls
GetProfileString('mci extensions',...
to get a list of multimedia extensions. This is redirected by Windows to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS NT\CURRENTVERSION\MCI EXTENSIONS
btw, this redirection is defined here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\win.ini

I didn't check yet whether it's also true for DirectShow player.

[ghisler(Author)]

Yes, I'm still using the same list, also the following extensions are hard coded:
*.avi *.wav *.mid *.rmi
*.mp2 *.mp3 *.mp4 *.mkv
If anyone has a better idea, please let me know!

[gdpr deleted 6]

Since it's discussed in a new separate topic, I'm moving my post from here.

How do you control which file extensions are considered by the new DirectShow media player?

For VfW player, as far as I understand, extensions are listed in Registry:

What has VfW to do with DirectShow?

(Also, under the assumption i understand the history.txt correctly, TC is able to explictly load LAV or other filters without requiring system-wide installation of these filters, there might not be any registry settings wrt to these filters...)

[ghisler(Author)]

What has VfW to do with DirectShow?

Nothing, I just couldn't find ANY documentation at all on how to determine which extensions are supported by DirectShow. I can't just try any types like txt or docx, this would slow down opening Lister a LOT.

[deus-ex]

FLV is just a MP4 file.
If I rename an flv to mp4 it plays without problems with the DirectShow media player.

Yes, this is a workaround, but it's not a satisfying solution. I already tried that myself to verify that TC's new media player is indeed able to play the mentioned formats it currently does not support by their respective extension.

The FLV format encoding is not the same as the MP4 format encoding, so technically it's not just an MP4 file.

[deus-ex]

I didn't check yet whether it's also true for DirectShow player.

Thanks for pointing this out. Adding the missing extensions to that registry key does work indeed.

EDIT: Adding the missing extensions work, except for the extension ".MID" which was already listed in the registry key.

Code: Select all

"mid"="Sequencer"

Also tried changing the value "Sequencer" to "MPEGVideo" without success.

[Horst.Epp]

I didn't check yet whether it's also true for DirectShow player.

Thanks for pointing this out. Adding the missing extensions to that registry key does work indeed.

EDIT: Adding the missing extensions work, except for the extension ".MID" which was already listed in the registry key.

Code: Select all

"mid"="Sequencer"

Also tried changing the value "Sequencer" to "MPEGVideo" without success.

Thank you both, that works

[deus-ex]

Yes, I'm still using the same list, also the following extensions are hard coded:
*.avi *.wav *.mid *.rmi
*.mp2 *.mp3 *.mp4 *.mkv
If anyone has a better idea, please let me know!

Perhaps you can add this to the respective lister config dialog, so the user can edit the list of supported extensions comfortably.

[ghisler(Author)]

Yes, I definitely plan to add a configuration option. But it would be nice to have a way to determine automatically what's supoorted...

[deus-ex]

As far as I know, you can't. For many years I have to edit the Windows registry to add support for several formats like OGG, OPUS, WEBM, and others to be accessible from the context menu to call a media player.

A config option for editing the registry key of supported multimedia extensions should perhaps show a warning note. Also, a back-up option that creates a copy of the current state of this registry key might be worth implementing.

[DrShark]

Maybe it would be good to have 2 settings for configuration of multimedia exiensions:
* the one internal to TC, based on currently hardcoded formats, with higher priority. Could be implemented as a simple input field with a plain list of extensions;
* additional one for changing multimedia extensions system wide for extensions TC uses via "GetProfileString('mci extensions' ...". Since they're stored in Registry in the format "extension"="file type name" (e.g. "mid"="Sequencer"), to show/edit them TC could use a 2-coulmns dialog based on "Lister: view methods by file type" one, which in TC 10 also has 2 columns (1st for extension and 2nd for view method). Of course it should be documented (maybe not only in Help, but also with a note in extension change dialog) that changes in that list will be applied for all applications, including other TC copies, which use that list.

And of course it should be documented in Help that the multimedia extensions used by TC applied not only to Lister's player, also but for the detection of extensions supported by plugins (with an operand "MULTIMEDIA" in a detectstring).

[gdpr deleted 6]

2DrShark
do not conflate DirectShow with MCI. Two entirely different architectures and frameworks. Querying through MCI won't give you any info about a DirectShow splitter or decoder. All you will get is some info about MCI, but which TC's new media player is not using anymore.

The least restrictive, albeit inconvenient solution is, as others suggested: Have some way for the user to specify the file extensions, since there is no way to crystal-ball-read whatever DirectShow splitters and codecs for whatever exotic file formats/containers a user might fancy. A feature which competent media players supporting external filters/codec (in contrast to only built-in codec such as is the case for VLC, for example) have to offer to the user anyway.

But i also would like to see the default file extension list built into TC being expanded. Particularly flac and, to an extent, webm are quite common file types these days. And not to forget m2ts, which is what you'll find on BDs and UHD BDs...

[DrShark]

do not conflate DirectShow with MCI. Two entirely different architectures and frameworks. Querying through MCI won't give you any info about a DirectShow splitter or decoder. All you will get is some info about MCI, but which TC's new media player is not using anymore...

It won't give that info, but as stated above, TC already uses the list of extensions defined for MCI system to play the files using DirectShow (which itself is an evolution of VfW). I'm not sure that the DirectShow player may actually fail on attempt the file with extensions defined for MCI system, espectially on modern Windows (it seems, there is a some distinction between MCI, VfW/VCM, and related legacy ACM API for audio). For example, here on Windows 7 32-bit both VfW and DirectShow based Lister's players play e.g. *.mid files fine, so the question is whether they use the same codecs (but with different API to access them)?