Serge,

Thanks for the pointers. I've made tremendous strides and can now see and record live video and audio. I am now running into threading issues with the following error message: The application called an interface that was marshalled for a different thread. I'm accessing this with the following snippet which is triggered from the actionPerformed event from a JButton:

           OleMessageLoop oleMessageLoop = oleContainer.getOleMessageLoop();

            Runnable runnable = new Runnable()

                {

                    public void run()

                    {

                        CtrlImpl ctrl = new CtrlImpl(oleContainer.getOleObject());

                        Recorder vRecorder = ctrl .getRecorder();

                        // first we get a handle to the userdef

                        API api = ctrl.getAPI();

                        Users users = api.getUsers();

                        UserDescription aUser = users.moveFirst();

                        String proposedName = "Kevin";

                        while (!aUser.getName().getValue().equalsIgnoreCase(proposedName)) {

                            users.moveNext(aUser);

                        }

                        // now pass the userdef to the recorder and verify the user.

                       vRecorder.verify(aUser);

                   }

                };

                try

                {

                    oleMessageLoop.doInvokeAndWait(runnable);

                }

                catch (InterruptedException e)

                {

                    e.printStackTrace();

                }

                catch (InvocationTargetException e)

                {

                    e.printStackTrace();

                }

        }

The problem line is UserDescription aUser = users.moveFirst(); If I do not run this within an OleMessageLoop then it will error for not having ComFunctions.coInitialize() being called on this thread. If I add ComFunctions.coInitialize then it errors with the same error. If I keep it in the OleMessageLoop (with no ComFunctions.coInitialize()) then it has the same error plus the OCX errors with RPC_E_WRONG_THREAD.

Seems like I'm now trying to understand the threading model. But for what it's worth, I have the event model working.

Thanks again in advance.

- Kevin

Things are finally working without fail. The OCX I'm working with has a main control (CTRL) object which retrieves other objects for you. It serves as a visual container (showing live images from the camera) and as an entry point for non-visual services like getting registered users. If I want a video recorder then I get it via the CTRL.getRecorder. Working visually the CTRL is part of the OCX and is created when the OleContainer is initialed for the OCX. So to get the CTRL I just did CTRL = oleContainer.getOleObject(). The interesting effect is that when in a different thread I could only get the objects held by the CTRL. So getting a valid (not null) Recorder worked fine. But if the Recorder made reference to another object then the marshalling problem occurs. For example Recoder.getStatus() which returned a Status object would cause a marshalling problem. The lesson learned for me is that when working in mulitple threads and needing to get to object deeper than those held by the top level object (in this case CTRL) it is necessary to create another instance of the CTRL. An instance that is used for non-visual interaction.

In this case it is necessary for me to create an instance of CTRL within a given OleMessageLoop and do all my work within that message loop. These two things allow me to traverse several layers of objects below the CTRL and ulitimately solved the threading problem.

So I end up with conceptually 2 instances of CTRL: 1) for visual use and is instantiated by the OleContainer, 2) for utilizing the services of the OCX and is instantiated by a create or queryInterface for the CTRL (as an INPROC_SERVER). Lastly is the usage of OleMessageLoop. This is a very important concept to get right if you intend to interact with the OCX.

Thanks for the help!

- Kevin