C# Video Playback

Question

I'm looking at trying to create a simple 'slider puzzle' game. You've seen the ones, you have an image and you shuffle the tiles.

However, I want to make one that will play back videos instead. What I'm trying to determine is whether it's possible to playback a video in C# and render the video on different controls (probably buttons, or panels). I've spotted the Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback classes but haven't found much documentation on them yet.

So to throw it up in the air, is this going to be possible to do without too much difficulty? Are there any useful (free) libraries that might help me along?

Answer 1

Have a look at DirectShowNet that wraps the DirectShow API, in the samples page there is a sample called PlayWnd the shows how to play a video file.

Answer 2

Depending upon how large and how long your video sources are, you could accomplish this very simply by first converting your videos to animated GIFs. A .Net PictureBox control will display and animate a GIF automatically, and you could easily use PictureBoxes for your tiles.

One big advantage of this approach is that (thanks to Mono) your application could work unaltered on Windows, Mac and the iPhone (also Linux and a couple others).