Playability of a file in windows media player

[sri2097]

Basically,
I want to check if a URL is playable or not (without actually playing
it).
i.e. given a URL I want to write an automation script to figure it out
for me
if it's playable or not. If you give a bad/invalid URL for windows
media
player to play a pop-up window shows us that it cannot be played. So
I would want to catch that event.

I have found 2 ways to do this -

1)

import win32com.client, win32api, sre, time

data = file("webclips.txt")
web_clips = data.readlines ()

shell = win32com.client.Dispatch("WScript.Shell")
shell.Run("wmplayer.exe")
shell.AppActivate("Windows Media Player")
win32api.Sleep(100)

print "Total :", len(web_clips)

for webclip in web_clips:
    shell.SendKeys("^u", 0)
    shell.AppActivate("Open URL")

    shell.SendKeys("{DEL}")
    shell.SendKeys(webclip)
    shell.SendKeys("~")
    time.sleep(25)

    if shell.AppActivate("Windows Media Player"):
        webclip = webclip
        not_there.append(webclip)
        shell.SendKeys("~")

print len(not_there)
print "Not here: ", not_there
~

In this way I manually fire Windows media player and do the checking.
But It's a brute force way of solving the problem (since for every URL
I keep a
time-out of 25 seconds). As a result it takes a lot of time.I had to
look for a
better solution. My second solution uses Windows much hyped ActiveX
controls.

2)

from win32com.client import Dispatch,DispatchWithEvents

class WMPEvents:
    def OnVisible(self,evt):
        print "OnVisible changed:",evt
    def OnError(self,evt=None):
        print "OnError",evt
    def OnMediaError(self,evt=None):
        print "OnMediaError",evt
    def OnDisconnect(self,evt):
        print "OnDisconnect",evt
    def OnStatusChange(self):
        print "OnStatusChange"
    def OnDisconnect(self,evt):
        print "Disconnect",evt
    def OnBuffering(self,evt):
        print "OnBuffering changed:",evt
    def OnOpenStateChange(self,evt=None):
        print "OnOpenStateChange" ,evt

mp = DispatchWithEvents("WMPlayer.OCX", WMPEvents)
mp.settings.autoStart = True
webclip_playlist = mp.newPlaylist('Web_Clips', "")

raw_web_clips = []
data = file("webclips.txt")
web_clips = data.readlines()

for url in web_clips:
        tune = mp.newMedia(url)
        mp.currentPlaylist.appendItem(tune)
        mp.controls.playItem (tune)
        mp.controls.play()
        mp.controls.stop()

raw_input("Press enter to stop playing")
mp.controls.stop()
mp.close()

This solution is much faster. But still I'm not able to solve it.
Initially I had
planned to use the "OnOpenStateChange" event to detect if a given URL
is in
a state just about to be opened. That's good enough for me to declare
that a
URL can be played. But as written in MSDN, they suggest not to rely on
state
changes as a definitive way to find details. So, I had to find an
alternative.
There is an event called "OnBuffering", i.e. when a link is found and
is just
about to be buffered this event (Boolean value) is triggered. But it
never seem
to happen.

I would be truly grateful if you can help in any way.