Developing video player app for Windows phone with more media codec support

Question

I am thinking of developing a video player app for windows phone 8 with more media codec support such as MKV, AVI, etc. And I'm also intending to add subtitle support as well. I'm new to WP8 development hence I am still working on the feasibility. As far as I know, the supported media codecs does not include formats like mkv or avi. But I am aware of one WP app (Moliplayer) which provides support for almost all media codecs and subtitles as well.

I'm wondering if there is a 3rd party library or something like that which enables developing a video player app with the above mentioned capabilities? If not what are the possible approaches to be taken towards developing one like Moliplayer?

Thanks in Advance!

Answer 1

The fastest way to get up and running with a video playback app is to bring in the Player Framework. (Hosted on codeplex) It will provide you will Closed Caption support and some nice playback controls (along with many other features).

As for the codec support, that is a bit harder. For Silverlight your best bet is to create a MediaStreamSource for the containers that WP doesn't support by default. Here is a nice article introducing the topic http://blogs.msdn.com/b/avib/archive/2010/03/10/silverlight-media-stream-source-part-1.aspx.

If you do not have to support WP8 then the new SDK for WP8.1 supports Media Extensions! http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/Media-extensions-sample-7b466096

Good Luck!