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Note: This is not a really useful plugin. It is more like a small coding experiment which I created for testing various impacts of writing a MFC plugin for Miranda which can use ActiveX objects.

Embedding flash movies in normal C or C++ applications is quite straightforward as long as you know how to use COM objects in your code. The flash player is such a control and can be embedded in any application which has been made ready to use COM objects.

In theory, it could be done in plain C/Win32, but it is much easier to do it with MFC or ATL. The additional C++/MFC overhead doesn't mean much as we are talking about embedding a rather big COM object anyway, so embedding the flash player will certainly increase the memory footprint of Miranda significantly. But, you know, everything has its price tag..

The example code doesn't do much. It creates a new frame on the contact list and will play a flash movie inside this frame. To run this plugin, you need a multiwindow-enabled contact list, like clist_mw, clist_modern or clist_nicer+ (that means, this plugin will *not* work on clist_classic).

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Recently, I discovered a new plugin for Miranda which made me want to revise a somewhat older and partially unmaintained plugin. I'am talking about mRadio, a quite new plugin which can play mp3 and various other audio streams from the basically does the same as Winamp or ITunes, but uses a lot less resources, because it is not an entire application - only a small plugin loaded into Miranda.

The SndVol plugin is a well known extension for all multiwindow - enabled contact lists. In its basic form, it provides only 2 simple features:

• Set the volume for event sounds (for example, the "incoming message sound"
• Provide a button to mute and unmute the event sounds

While this is not much, the plugin does its job well. It creates a small frame on the contact list containing the mute button and a slider control for setting the volume. My changes are basically a few new features which allow SndVol to control the mRadio plugin. You can now quickly set the mRadio volume using the slider on the contact list and the mute feature does work with mRadio. And finally, I added an option to change the background color of the frame. That's all.