How do I play movies in a C# WinForm application

I am trying to开发者_C百科 play a movie (wmv,avi,mpg,etc.) in a winforms application. I would like the user to be able to start, stop and pause.

I'm not looking for a full answer ... I just need pointed in the right direction. I've already did some searching on google but could not find anything useful. I can continue searching but I know the stackoverflow community rocks.

So, please point me in the right direction!

Thanks.

I think this is probably the path of least resistance:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb383953.aspx

You could use Windows Media Player ActiveX control.

You could also embed a WPF control that contains a MediaElement control.

Another alternative is to use the VLC library instead of Windows Media Player. The VLC Forums have a number of wrappers that can be used in C#.

I have not done a comparison of VLC versus Windows Media Player, but it is alot less resource intensive then the WPF media elements.

If I remember correctly VLC also has built in support for alot of video formats, potentially making it a better choice I guess.

It depends on how complicated you want to get, but I've had luck implementing DirectShow before. It's definitely more complicated than a drop on control, but it's really flexible for different formats and loading codecs.

One possibility is to use the Forms.WebBrowser class. This will give you an embedded web browser so you can install what ever player and plugins you need.