Playing video files in Windows Phone 8

Question

I'd like to make app for WP8, which will download and play movies. Android Market has lots apps of this type. But all of just get content, and pass it to video player (MX player for example), and format can be different (.avi, .mkv, .mpeg, etc.), but player shows the content without any problems. For exaple on my Samsung s5830, 1400 mb .avi movie plays good. As I can see - WP8 doesn't has custom video players.

Question: if I download in my app, from web, some movie in .avi format, could I play it on WP8? The same question for video stream for web.

Solution 1

You can play back any video file which is supported by the phone (this is documented on MSDN here). You can stream or play downloaded video from Isolated Storage using the MediaElement in the SDK and on WP8 I think there is a DirectX option too.

It's not enough to say that a file type is supported as these are just video "containers" - each container can contain audio and video of different codecs. MKVs don't look like they're supported at all however.

You can see this video format (codec) support varies between WP7 and 8 and even some kinds of phone dependent on what the chipset in the phone supports. (especially for the high bitrate HD codecs).

Solution 2

There is a nice framework that helps you on playing movies inside your app! Take a look at it on codeplex http://playerframework.codeplex.com

And some documentation http://smf.codeplex.com/documentation