but what about the ugly hack for mplayer ? what does it and why
Metamorphium did this. He calls mplayer.exe (it's a movie player) from inside wme to play a movie. It's not really elegant and I wouldn't suggest it to anyone.
There is no ugly hack anymore. It doesn't work even with it. Problem is that if you run your game in the same resolution as your desktop is (including bpp) sometimes WME is not able to minimize itself. Unless Microsoft repairs it, I don't suggest this to anyone.
I disagree with odnorf though - it was the only solution without paying $2000 for commercial codecs. If Microsoft ever fix this (looks like DirectX issue to me) I am going to use it, because it gives many posibilities including multi language subtitles and whatever. And dll itself was very elegant. It is sufficient to call one function with video file as a parameter. That's all.
Also my brother wrote a mplayer patch which makes it decode data into network socket, so maybe this would be the way how to get this directly into WME without need of minimalization.
But ... of course any better solutions would be greatly appreciated. *wink* at odnorf...