SinusPi
9th March 2010 16:52 UTC

Shockwave Flash control in UI
Goal: I need an animated Flash banner on my installer.

By my research so far, it seems that the SWF control is a COM object, which has to be instantiated using CoCreateInstance instead of CreateControl (though I am in no way sure of that yet).

Any ideas how that should finally be achieved? I'm quite fine with making a DLL-calling plugin of some sort, or even recompiling some UI exe, if pointed towards some proper source files, if that's what it takes.

SinusPi
9th March 2010 22:30 UTC

Solved, after much enlightening but unnecessary tinkering.

        System::Call `atl::AtlAxWinInit() i.r0`
        ${If} $0 == 0
          MessageBox MB_OK "Unable to initialize ActiveX at all."
          GoTo badflash
        ${EndIf}
        
        System::Call `kernel32::GetModuleHandle(i 0) i.R3`
        System::Call 'user32::CreateWindowEx(i 0, t "AtlAxWin", t "http://somewhere.com/movie.swf", i ${WS_CHILD}|${WS_VISIBLE}, i 0, i 0, i 250, i 250, i $HWNDPARENT, i 0, i R3, i 0) i.R1'
        ${If} $R1 == 0
                System::Call 'kernel32::GetLastError() i.R1'
                MessageBox MB_OK "Flashbox init error: $R1"
        ${EndIf}

        badflash:

SinusPi
10th March 2010 18:50 UTC

The above has a potential performance drawback - it essentially creates an ActiveX window, with a shell document window in it, with Internet Explorer in it, and finally with Shockwave Flash inside. So, here's another way of doing this, with less resulting window clutter:

System::Call `atl::AtlAxWinInit() i.r0`
System::Call `kernel32::GetModuleHandle(i 0) i.R3`
System::Call 'user32::CreateWindowEx(i 0, t "AtlAxWin", t "{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000}", i ${WS_CHILD}|${WS_VISIBLE}, i 0, i 0, i 250, i 250, i $HWNDPARENT, i 0, i R3, i 0) i.R1'
System::Call `atl::AtlAxGetControl(i R1, *i .r1) i .r0`
StrCpy $3 "c:\\folder\\movie.swf"
System::Call "$1->22(w r3) i .r2"  ; 22 = set_Movie