Repost of previous question: MediaElement in WPF

Question

I am looking for a solution for a question that was already posted but did not answer correctly, thanks in advance.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1346886/show-first-frame-of-video-in-wpf-mediaelement

Answer 1

The solution in the other thread should work but you could approach it differently.

Basically, to avoid having to load the video just to grab the first frame you could generate a static image that is the frame you want to show. If you are encoding the video most encoding software will generate a thumbnail for you for this purpose. If not you can screen shot a frame and use that

Then display that image in a normal WPF image control when the movie is not playing. When the user plays the video use a trigger to hide the image and show the video.

This will give you the effect you want.

Downside: This static image will get out of sync with the video if your video file is updated (you would need to regenerate the thumbnail in this case)