Goal. I am trying to build an auto-captioning software for downloaded videos. I need to watch the video, and listen to the audio, and see what the speech recognizer reads and make any changes that I need to. So I decided that the Windows Media Player Component would work best to watch and playback the video.
Expected Result I should be able to just go to ToolBox >> Right Click >> Choose Items... >> COM Components >> Check the Windows Media Player checkbox >> OK. and have the component show up in my Toolbox.
Actual Result The "All Tools" tab expands in my toolbox, but my "axWindowsMediaPlayer1" is nowhere to be found. There is no error message, in fact, I get a box telling me it was added successfully. But again, I try to find it but it is nowhere to be found.
What I've tried
- Closing Out of Visual Studio 2019 and reopening it.
- Switching from 4.0 to 3.1.
- Adding the form from system32 with the Wmp.dll file.
- Reseting the Toolbox.
- Creating a new tab in the toolbox and trying to add it there (which results in the tab removing itself).
- Removing all components from the toolbox (which didn't work any of the times I tried).
- Reading the Microsoft's Documentation about adding the Windows Media Player again.




