Autorun and render settings

[Mike Kujbida]

I had to do this a long time ago and my inf file looked like this:

[autorun]
open=mplayer2.exe /fullscreen /play /close \myvideo.mpg

Pay close attention to the spacing as it’s critical to getting things to work properly.

The root of the CD looked like this:
autorun.inf
mplayer2.exe
myvideo.mpg

mplayer2.exe is recommended as it’s an older version of Media Player (6.4 as I recall) and is quite small.
It’s still on XP but I don’t know about Vista or Windows 7.
If you want to use the newer version, use wmplayer.exe instead of mplayer2.exe
Remember to put it on the root of the CD.
I used MPEG 1 as it’s a very universal format and it can be customized for HD size files.

If you’re interested, Autoplay Frustration is the thread on a newsgroup where I got my answer.

[Matt Crowley]

The OPEN command is designed to run an application on the disc, but it will also trigger the playback of a video how you’ve used it.

The SHELLEXECUTE command is probably better/safer. It will basically have the same effect as double-clicking the video file in Explorer – i.e. the default/associated player on the user’s system will open and play the video normally. This will normally be whatever version of Windows Media Player they have installed.

So you’d have something like:
[autorun]
SHELLEXECUTE=VIDEO.WMV
ICON=LOGO_SMALL.ICO
LABEL=MyCompany Product Demo

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorun.inf and https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144200%28VS.85%29.aspx for the details of all Autorun features.

As for the video… WMV is pretty safe for Windows systems. Keep the frame size relatively small so that it’ll play fine at full size on smaller laptops and older PCs. Try it at 640×480 (or 640×360 for widescreen) and see if it’s clear enough. If not, you’ll have to re-frame (pan/crop) the screen captures or go larger (720p?), but be aware that the video may play back smaller than full size on small screens, making fine detail harder to see. This is mainly an issue on netbooks, but since they mostly don’t have optical drives it’s not a big concern. What size/format are the screen capture clips?

[Aleksey Tarasov]

Microsoft Finally Turns Off AutoRun in Vista, XP

[Robert Ingham]

Thanks for the replies, they’ve been very helpful.

The intro is filmed in 720p, and the screens were re-recorded at a low resolution of 1024×768 (they were originally recorded in 1680×1050, but playback on lower res screens made the text unreadable)

I’ll try the shellexecute command.

Thanks for the link Aleksey, I was worried for a moment but it looks like they’re saying “CDs, DVD and USB drives with high-end security features will still AutoRun as before.”

So this shouldn’t affect me as long as I’m using a CD to distribute right?

If it were to affect me, on XP systems with this update, would it do nothing at all? or would it present a dialog to the user like Win7 does?

[Matt Crowley]

It looks like you’ll still be fine with AutoPlay on a CD. It sounds like MS were mainly worried about auto-running malware on USB thumb drives. If it is disabled by the update, you should still get a dialog asking what to do (open explorer, play video etc.)

As a fall-back, you can add a note on the CD label/insert telling users how to play the video file manually if it doesn’t autorun.