ANIMATE Control

The ANIMATE control is a Windows control that plays a very basic AVI (Audio-Video Interleaved) file.

It is normally used to indicate system activity during lengthy operations such as copying and searching for files, and prior to the release of Windows Vista it was a core part of the Windows Explorer shell. Since then it has been somewhat deprecated in that role, but the control is still part of Windows and available for use with OpenInsight.

Developer Notes

1. Early versions of the control (prior to ComCtl32.dll v6) used a separate thread to play the animation, but this was removed from version 6 (i.e. from Windows XP onwards when using visual styles). In this case you must call the Basic+ Yield() function frequently during any long running process to allow the Animation control to play the file as it now uses an internal TIMER event.
2. The control can display and AVI file originating from either an uncompressed AVI file or from an AVI file that was compressed using run-length (BI_RLE8) encoding. It must not contain a sound channel.
3. Several standard Windows AVI files are supplied with OpenInsight for common operations such as file copying, moving, deleting and so on.