This is the issue that finally pushed me over the edge to setting up this blog.  Normally when you have a coding problem, you find the answer fairly quickly and move on.  Sometimes though, the solution remains elusive.  Then you put the answer on a page of your own, to help out the next weary traveler.

Which bring me neatly to…

AudioVideoPlayback

I recently posted my lightweight media viewer, Picsie.  As well as images, it also handles some formats of videos.  The video playback was largely on a whim when I stumbled across the wonders of Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback.  The code to set it up and use it is endearingly simple:

Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback.Video videoPlayer
	= new Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback.Video(filename);
videoPlayer.Owner = videoPanel;
videoPlayer.Play();

Give it a video file and a control to draw on, and tell it to start.  Some form of error handling is probably wise too.

All well and good so far.  A few buttons to control playback, and you’ve got a basic but functional video player.  My problem came when I wanted the video to have the same control system as the rest of Picsie – left-double-click to centre, right-click to exit, drag to move.  These all worked for images, but when I came to test it on videos, only the drag code seemed to work.

It was pretty simple to diagnose.  MouseDown, MouseMove and MousePress all continued to function as before.  For reasons unknown, the Video object ate any Click, MouseClick, DoubleClick and MouseDoubleClick events.

At this point the Internet failed me.  No solutions, and I had two features no longer working:

• Right-click to exit
• Double-click to centre

Not able to find a way to get my events back, it was fairly trivial, if a little messy, to move the right-click code to the MouseUp event, with a little jiggery pokery to make sure it was a click and not a drag.  On the other hand, did I really want to write all the code to check for and handle double clicks myself?  No, no I didn’t.  Thankfully, I didn’t have to.  MouseEventArgs has a “Clicks” property (when did that appear, and why did nobody tell me?), which you can use to fake a double-click event:

private void Panel_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
	if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left && e.Clicks == 2) {
		//Double-click
	}
}

And there you go.  I never did find out why the Video object ate my events.  There’s probably a really simple solution somewhere, or I did something boneheaded, but more than one person faced this problem and never found an answer, so here’s mine.  Fake clicks and double-clicks.

tldr/

Problem: AudioVideoPlayback.Video eats MouseClick and MouseDoubleClick events.

Solution: Check for double-clicks using the MouseEventArgs “Clicks” property in the MouseDown/MouseUp events which aren’t eaten.