Graphics and Multimedia

Outline Introduction to Multimedia Loading, Displaying and Scaling Images Windows Media Player Adding a Flash Movie Microsoft Agent

Introduction to Multimedia Visual Basic offers many convenient ways to include images and animations in programs Computing field decades ago mainly used computers to perform arithmetic calculations – We are beginning to realize the importance of computer’s data-manipulation capabilities Multimedia programming presents many challenges Multimedia applications demand extraordinary computing power

Loading, Displaying and Scrolling Images Visual Basic’s multimedia capabilities – Graphics – Images – Animations – Video Image manipulation

1 ' Fig : DisplayLogo.vb 2 ' Displaying and resizing an image. 3 4 Public Class FrmDisplayLogo 5 Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form 6 15 Private mGraphicsObject As Graphics 16 Private mImage As Image ' sets member variables on form load 19 Private Sub FrmDisplayLogo_Load(ByVal sender As _ 20 System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) _ 21 Handles MyBase.Load ' get Form's graphics object 24 mGraphicsObject = Me.CreateGraphics ' load image 27 mImage = Image.FromFile("images/Logo.gif") End Sub ' FrmDisplayLogo_Load 30 Uses Form method CreateGraphics to create a Graphics object associated with the Form The Image method FromFile retrieves an image stored on disk and assigns it to mImage

33 Private Sub cmdSetButton_Click (ByVal sender As System.Object, _ 34 ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles cmdSetButton.Click ' get user input 37 Dim width As Integer = Convert.ToInt32(txtWidth.Text) 38 Dim height As Integer = Convert.ToInt32(txtHeight.Text) ' if specified dimensions are too large display problem 41 If (width > 375 OrElse height > 225) Then 42 MessageBox.Show("Height or Width too large") Return 45 End If 46 mGraphicsObject.Clear(Me.BackColor) ' clear Windows Form ' draw image 49 mGraphicsObject.DrawImage(mImage, 5, 5, width, height) 50 End Sub ' cmdSetButton_Click End Class ' FrmDisplayLogo If the parameters are valid, Graphics method Clear is called to paint the entire Form in the current background color Graphics method DrawImage is called with the following parameters: the image to draw, the x-coordinate of the upper-left corner, y-coordinate of the upper- left corner, width of the image, and height of the image

Windows Media Player Windows Media player – Enables an application to play video and sound in many multimedia formats Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) Audio-Video Interleave (AVI) Windows wave-file format (WAV) Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) – To use the Windows Media Player control, programmers must add the control to the Toolbox. This is accomplished as following:

1. Go to ToolBox  Choose Items Click on the COM Components tab and scroll down near the bottom of the List. Look for Windows Media Player. 3. When you have found Windows Media Player, check the box beside it and click on Ok. Windows Media Player

4. The windows media player control should now be in your Toolbox 5. Drag the control over a form and size it as needed. Windows Media Player

Adding Flash Movie In order to play the Flash movie in your VB.NET application, you should add Shockwave Flash component as COM reference in your project and use Shockwave control added in the Toolbox. The following steps shows you the way: 1. In Solution Explore, right click References and choose Add Reference. In COM tab, add Shockwave Flash. 2. Right click Toolbox -> Click "Choose Items", in COM Components tab, choose Shockwave Flash Object, then you can see the control in the Toolbox. 3. Drag and drop the Shockwave control on the form, you may get "Failed to import the ActiveX control. Please ensure it is properly registered." error message. Click OK. 4. Right click the project name in Solution Explorer, choose "Rebuild". When the project rebuild successfully, you are able to add the Shockwave control on the form this time.

Example Public Class Form1 Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, _ ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load AxShockwaveFlash1.Movie = "D:\nabd.swf" AxShockwaveFlash1.Play() End Sub End Class

Make sure that you have the latest version of Shockwave and Flash Player. oad/download.cgi (Shockwave) d/do...=ShockwaveFlash (Flash Player) oad/download.cgi d/do...=ShockwaveFlash

Microsoft Agent – Microsoft Agent is a technology used to add interactive animated characters to Windows applications or Web pages Microsoft Agent control provides programmers with access to four predefined characters: Genie (a genie), Merlin (a wizard), Peedy (a parrot), and Robby (a robot).

Microsoft provides basic information on Agent technology at its Web site: This section introduces the basic capabilities of the Microsoft Agent control. For complete details on downloading this control, visit: The following example, Peedy’s Pizza Palace, was developed by Microsoft to illustrate the capabilities of the Microsoft Agent control. You can view this example at: Microsoft Agent

Fig Peedy introducing himself when the window opens.

To use MS Agent, you have to add to your ToolBox: 1. Go to ToolBox  Choose Items Click on the COM Components tab and scroll down near the bottom of the List. Check MS Agent Control. 3. Drag it to your form Before running any code, you first must download and install the control, speech recognition engine, text to speech engine and the character definitions from the Microsoft Agent Web site listed previously. Microsoft Agent

In addition to the Microsoft Agent object myAgent (of type AxAgent) that manages all the characters, we also need an object (of type IAgentCtlCharacter) to represent the current character. We create this object, named mSpkr,