Black Screen Visualizer for WMP

Last year I assembled my Media Center machine. Although I think the interface design is not optimal, I’ll never go back to having a separate TV, DVD an Audio System. One thing that bugged was not being able to turn off the monitor with the remote. When I’m playing music I don’t really need to see the mce interface. So this weekend I decided to figure out how to make a Visualizer plugin. I wanted to build a visualizer that visualizes… uhm .. NOTHING… Just a black screen so I won’t have to turn of my monitor.

So I downloaded the Windows Media SDK, read the help files and found a code sample. Unfortunately it didn’t work right away, because I’m using visual studio 2005. Searching msdn, I did find a way to convert the windowsmediaplugin wizard to VS 2005.

In the sample I just commented out the lines that did the visualizing, and changed the presets that came with it.
After building the solution, I got a dll that I could register on my MCE machine.

Sweet, now all it needs is some testing.