Playing videos in C# application via Windows Media Player. Is there a stable, decently performing solution?

Question

I've written a WPF application (in Visual C# 2010 Express) that has 2 windows. The 1st has a various buttons, the other displays video using the MediaElement control. When a button is pressed, a video associated with it is played or stopped if it's already playing.

On my development machine (Windows 7, good graphics card, lots of memory etc), this runs fine. The only problem I've encountered is that when attached to the debugger it is very unstable but when run normally these issues go away.

Unfortunately when run on a much less powerful XP machine the videos run at 1-2fps. This is despite the fact that the videos run fine in Windows Media Player.

There seem to quite a lot of reports of poor performance for the MediaElement control (not to mention inconsistencies in what it can play) so I decided to look at some alternatives.

I tried a free library call WPF MediaKit (http://wpfmediakit.codeplex.com) that I thought might have some effect, however while I've got it to work on an XP machine, it resolutely refuses to display videos on my development machine despite using exactly the same code. I'm still hoping I can this to work but I'm not confident it will help given it's still using the MediaElement control behind the scenes.

I then tried using wmp.dll COM control (Windows forms rather than WPF) and even with the simplest app (new Windows Form project, WMP control added to form, and 1 line of code to set the URL on load) I get odd behaviour. With the debugger attached, it works across multiple monitors, but sometimes when it starts playing, it just repeatedly stutters over the 1st few frames and the only way to break it out of this seems to be to move it to the other monitor. If I'm not using the debugger, I don't seem to get the stutter issue but the video is only displayed on the main monitor, as soon as I move the window to the secondary monitor, it goes black.

So my question is has anyone experienced anything like the above and/or have a decent solution to it? It would be especially nice to find something that works consistently with and without the debugger attached!

Answer 1

Have you tried this library?

http://directshownet.sourceforge.net/about.html

There's also this .NET interface to VideoLAN media player, but that introduces a dependency to VLC:

http://wiki.videolan.org/.Net_Interface_to_VLC

Answer 2

WPF MediaKit does not use MediaElement behind the scenes, but instead uses the D3DImage interop class to provide high performance video to WPF.

WPF in XP has always been a hit-or-miss in terms of performance. You might want to take a look at the rendering tier to ensure WPF is fully hardware accelerating. Also make sure you have the newest video drivers available and that the GPU is capable.

-Jer