Any Way to Have Windows Context Menu Have "Add Media" Menu for TWO Players?

[pone44]

Windows Explorer has a right click option for video files that let you add those files into the queue of the default player for that type of file. I have contexts in which I use two different players. Is there any way to manually modify the Windows context menu for MP4 files to have it include options for both of the players that I use, not just the default system player?

The two specific players I use for MP4 are VLC and Windows Media Player.

[usually_quiet]

I suspect that doing what you want would require editing the registry. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about how the registry works to tell you which entries you'd need to modify.

[DB83]

Maybe I misread your request but on my Windows system I already have that functionality.

If I right-click on a file and select 'Open With' rather than the play option I see another window with all the players I have used to play a video.

Ok. It is one more mouse click but.....

[johns0]

I believe the op wants a menu or command that lets him add media file to both players play list at the same time,not sure if it can be done.

[usually_quiet]

I believe the op wants a menu or command that lets him add media file to both players play list at the same time,not sure if it can be done.

Maybe we need further clarification. I thought the OP wanted to add an additional entry to the context menu which would allow him to add an mp4 file to either VLC's playlist or WMP's playlist, not both playlists at the same time.

[DB83]

Ah.

[jagabo]

Use the Send To menu. That's what it's for.

[pone44]

Maybe I misread your request but on my Windows system I already have that functionality.

If I right-click on a file and select 'Open With' rather than the play option I see another window with all the players I have used to play a video.

Ok. It is one more mouse click but.....

I don't think you read the original question correctly. Of course I can OPEN media files with a gazillion different players. What I want to do instead is to silently add the media file into the open queue.

Use case: I am listening to songs on a specific media player. I want to add a few MP3s into the playlist of that player from Windows Explorer. I go to those MP3 files in Windows Explorer and right-click and "add to queue of <player X>"

[pone44]

I suspect that doing what you want would require editing the registry. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about how the registry works to tell you which entries you'd need to modify.

That was my reading of things too, but I was hoping someone had an application to automate it partly.

[pone44]

I believe the op wants a menu or command that lets him add media file to both players play list at the same time,not sure if it can be done.

Maybe we need further clarification. I thought the OP wanted to add an additional entry to the context menu which would allow him to add an mp4 file to either VLC's playlist or WMP's playlist, not both playlists at the same time.

Correct. Either, not Both.

[pone44]

Use the Send To menu. That's what it's for.

That was a partial solution. For VLC, it started a second instance of VLC, which I did not want to do. I can reconfigure the VLC user interface to always force a single instance of VLC, then your solution works. But it feels like a side-effect, not a reliable intended design.

For Windows Media Player, it completely failed. My music queue gets wiped out when I use "send to" menu item to send additional MP3 files to Windows Media Player.

[stax76]

Open++ or Open with++ is much better then Send To.

https://github.com/stax76/OpenWithPlusPlus

[pone44]

Open++ or Open with++ is much better then Send To.

https://github.com/stax76/OpenWithPlusPlus

Where is the binary download for 64-bit windows? Do I have to separately install a GUI?

[stax76]

You need 7zip to unpack it, GUI is included, please read the full start page.

https://github.com/stax76/OpenWithPlusPlus/releases

[pone44]

You need 7zip to unpack it, GUI is included, please read the full start page.

https://github.com/stax76/OpenWithPlusPlus/releases

Once this is installed, how do you get access to the existing context menu items, so that you can observe those settings and use them as the basis for new commands in different contexts? Specifically, I want to see what the Windows Media Player "Add to Queue" context looks like, so I can add it as an option for MP4 file, which are currently set to use VLC as the default player.

[stax76]

It's either not possible or difficult to get such info, I used to offer a tool (FileTypeRegistryViewer) to find the reg keys but nowadays use it only for private use. Anything file assoc related is difficult, some of the worst part of Windows. Maybe there are some tools to deal with shell extensions, I'm only using my own.

[Cornucopia]

Batch (or vbs or powershell) script - with Append - with env variables, then put the link to the batch in sendto.

Scott

[pone44]

Batch (or vbs or powershell) script - with Append - with env variables, then put the link to the batch in sendto.

Scott

I only barely understood what you are trying to say here. It is not clear how a script helps me with any part of my request because you did not provide the context for the solution. But Sendto was already rejected earlier in this thread. It works for VLC and fails for Media Player. When you "Sendto" a video to Media Player, it destroys the existing play queue and starts a new queue from scratch.

[pone44]

It's either not possible or difficult to get such info, I used to offer a tool (FileTypeRegistryViewer) to find the reg keys but nowadays use it only for private use. Anything file assoc related is difficult, some of the worst part of Windows. Maybe there are some tools to deal with shell extensions, I'm only using my own.

I spent quite some time playing with the registry, and you are right this is nontrivial. The real problem is that each application has its own unique approach to how it sets up context menu actions. Media Player has an "Enqueue" action and VLC has an "AddtoPlaylistVLC" action and each of those has a totally different setup. If I were willing to invest hours into this I could probably hack it but it just isn't worth that much time.

[stax76]

@Cornucopia, jagabo

Maybe also try Open with++, it's a great improvement compared to Send To.


@pone44

You might find a related tool I wrote helpful.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cmrelbnsfztrjys/FileTypeRegistryViewer.7z?dl=0

[pone44]

Open++ or Open with++ is much better then Send To.

https://github.com/stax76/OpenWithPlusPlus

I played a bit with Open ++, and a concern is that I can register the DLL but I cannot uninstall it. When I attempt to uninstall I get a DLLRegisterServer error 0x80070002 which appears to mean that a non-administrative account was used to do the deregistration. I run OpenWithPlusPlus as administrator, but this does not change the result. Any advice on how to do the uninstall?

I will play with your other tool later and see if I can get it working with insights I get from that.

[stax76]

My app is called 'Open with++', I'm getting an error code too for unregistering but another one and it's not trivial to fix because it was written in C++ ten years ago and meanwhile I've forgotten a lot of things, C++ is an extremely difficult programming language, I've not used it in the last ten years. Some good day I might fix it and maybe add icon support, it surely was working correctly in the past, I assume it is broke due to changes in the platform SDK or something like that, maybe a good C++ dev can take a look. I usually prefer dotnet for programming. You can restart explorer from the task manager and then you can probably delete the app before it loads again, might leave some traces in the registry due to unregistering not working, doesn't matter that much, we are talking about like five reg entries.

Why do you want to uninstall it btw? I've like 30 entries and cannot imagine not having this app, use it numerous times a day, most often to copy file paths to the clipboard, for git, for opening powershell and to unpack archives and sometimes I open media files of course with media apps such as mpc, virtualdub or mkvtoolnix gui.

[Cornucopia]

Batch (or vbs or powershell) script - with Append - with env variables, then put the link to the batch in sendto.

Scott

I only barely understood what you are trying to say here. It is not clear how a script helps me with any part of my request because you did not provide the context for the solution. But Sendto was already rejected earlier in this thread. It works for VLC and fails for Media Player. When you "Sendto" a video to Media Player, it destroys the existing play queue and starts a new queue from scratch.

There is nothing inherently wrong with "sendto", just in what is being sent and where it is being sent.

I'm not going to write your script for you, but it is fairly straightforward to:
Capture a filename & path as a variable
Format that variable in ways that are compatible with both the apps' playlist metafiles (which are, btw, inherently text files)
Open and append the default playlists (or special ones to your liking), adding the "variable" at start or end
Close & save the playlists/metafiles
Repeat ad nauseum

Sendto can be used to send those filenames to the script, NOT to the playlists themselves directly.

This puts the brains of the actions in your hands, not in the hands of an app coder who may or may not have your special use case in mind.

Scott

[pone44]

My app is called 'Open with++', I'm getting an error code too for unregistering but another one and it's not trivial to fix because it was written in C++ ten years ago and meanwhile I've forgotten a lot of things, C++ is an extremely difficult programming language, I've not used it in the last ten years. Some good day I might fix it and maybe add icon support, it surely was working correctly in the past, I assume it is broke due to changes in the platform SDK or something like that, maybe a good C++ dev can take a look. I usually prefer dotnet for programming. You can restart explorer from the task manager and then you can probably delete the app before it loads again, might leave some traces in the registry due to unregistering not working, doesn't matter that much, we are talking about like five reg entries.

Why do you want to uninstall it btw? I've like 30 entries and cannot imagine not having this app, use it numerous times a day, most often to copy file paths to the clipboard, for git, for opening powershell and to unpack archives and sometimes I open media files of course with media apps such as mpc, virtualdub or mkvtoolnix gui.

Part of getting comfortable with a tool is understanding its limitations, and I generally want to find a way to do the uninstall when I am still not sure if I will end up with the tool. I haven't decided that I do not need it.

By the way, after I installed this application, I can no longer invoke the Command Prompt from the Start menu, so that's not a great sign. There may be some unintended side effects from the older code.

If I want to uninstall using the registry manually, what are the class and program ID I would need to remove or rename under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT? Once I disable that and reboot I will let you know whether the Command Prompt starts working again.

[pone44]

Batch (or vbs or powershell) script - with Append - with env variables, then put the link to the batch in sendto.

Scott

I only barely understood what you are trying to say here. It is not clear how a script helps me with any part of my request because you did not provide the context for the solution. But Sendto was already rejected earlier in this thread. It works for VLC and fails for Media Player. When you "Sendto" a video to Media Player, it destroys the existing play queue and starts a new queue from scratch.

There is nothing inherently wrong with "sendto", just in what is being sent and where it is being sent.

I'm not going to write your script for you, but it is fairly straightforward to:
Capture a filename & path as a variable
Format that variable in ways that are compatible with both the apps' playlist metafiles (which are, btw, inherently text files)
Open and append the default playlists (or special ones to your liking), adding the "variable" at start or end
Close & save the playlists/metafiles
Repeat ad nauseum

Sendto can be used to send those filenames to the script, NOT to the playlists themselves directly.

This puts the brains of the actions in your hands, not in the hands of an app coder who may or may not have your special use case in mind.

Scott

I don't understand how your proposed script solves anything. If I want to start N files together, I can just multi-select at the same time and send To Windows Media Player. That works fine already and I do not need a script. On the other hand, if I start two files in the play queue, then I, later on, want to add five more files into the queue, your script would need to invoke some command line option for Windows Media Player to add the new files to the queue. I could not find such an option in the sparse documentation I was able to locate online. If such a command line option does not exist, how is the script you propose going to add additional new files into an existing play queue?

[stax76]

By the way, after I installed this application, I can no longer invoke the Command Prompt from the Start menu, so that's not a great sign. There may be some unintended side effects from the older code.

It's extremely unlikely that Open with++ is the cause!

You can delete the keys manually by searching the registry for:

OpenWithPP

and also:

{E7B8ACF5-FC18-4f0d-BC50-D0184481A5DC}

[Cornucopia]

Batch (or vbs or powershell) script - with Append - with env variables, then put the link to the batch in sendto.

Scott

I only barely understood what you are trying to say here. It is not clear how a script helps me with any part of my request because you did not provide the context for the solution. But Sendto was already rejected earlier in this thread. It works for VLC and fails for Media Player. When you "Sendto" a video to Media Player, it destroys the existing play queue and starts a new queue from scratch.

There is nothing inherently wrong with "sendto", just in what is being sent and where it is being sent.

I'm not going to write your script for you, but it is fairly straightforward to:
Capture a filename & path as a variable
Format that variable in ways that are compatible with both the apps' playlist metafiles (which are, btw, inherently text files)
Open and append the default playlists (or special ones to your liking), adding the "variable" at start or end
Close & save the playlists/metafiles
Repeat ad nauseum

Sendto can be used to send those filenames to the script, NOT to the playlists themselves directly.

This puts the brains of the actions in your hands, not in the hands of an app coder who may or may not have your special use case in mind.

Scott

I don't understand how your proposed script solves anything. If I want to start N files together, I can just multi-select at the same time and send To Windows Media Player. That works fine already and I do not need a script. On the other hand, if I start two files in the play queue, then I, later on, want to add five more files into the queue, your script would need to invoke some command line option for Windows Media Player to add the new files to the queue. I could not find such an option in the sparse documentation I was able to locate online. If such a command line option does not exist, how is the script you propose going to add additional new files into an existing play queue?

As I already said, in my suggestion, it is not WMP or VLC that is adding files to the queue (playlist), it is the script itself inputting directly into the playlist. Yes, it is command line, what about it? Again, those playlists are nothing more than text files, and it's easy to append a text file via script.

Now, if you are currently RUNNING (playing) that playlist, the playlist will usually be locked from being modified. If the app allows it at all, it would probably reset to start over. Is that what you are trying to do?

Scott

[pone44]

Now, if you are currently RUNNING (playing) that playlist, the playlist will usually be locked from being modified. If the app allows it at all, it would probably reset to start over. Is that what you are trying to do?

I am trying to add to the currently running playlist, which is some kind of on-the-fly constructed "Now Playing" list. Even if I could locate where that file is kept (it might be memory mapped), I would have to deal with the fact that the file is likely locked by Media Player, and I would also have to actively parse and edit the XML contents. Then my code breaks the moment there is a significant upgrade in Windows. It doesn't seem like the low-hanging fruit to solve this problem.

[stax76]

I was able to fix Open with++ (new version already available).

[pone44]

By the way, after I installed this application, I can no longer invoke the Command Prompt from the Start menu, so that's not a great sign. There may be some unintended side effects from the older code.

It's extremely unlikely that Open with++ is the cause!

You can delete the keys manually by searching the registry for:

OpenWithPP

and also:

{E7B8ACF5-FC18-4f0d-BC50-D0184481A5DC}

I finally got around to disabling this, and I hate to tell you but immediately my problem with opening a command line shell from Windows Start menu went away. I am guessing what is happening is that your app is being called by every new shell as a "ShellEx" and somehow your application is not chaining correctly and passing control to the next ShellEx.

What is amazing here is I could not even start up Computer Manager! Critical functions on the computer just became unusable. It's appalling that Microsoft would create an architecture that could be so easily sabotaged by one failing ShellEx application, but apparently that is what happened.