Easiest way to play audio in an openTK application, using any method - c#

My goal here is to be able to play an MP3 in an OpenTK/OpenGL application (.NET but NOT windows forms), being able to stop/play/pause it, access/set the position of the audio file, and have it play to within a few milliseconds of when I tell it to.
I've tried using WindowsMediaPlayer (WMPLib) but for whatever reason the audio doesn't start playing until I resize or move the window. Not sure why but it probably has something to do with the fact that it's meant to be a control on Windows Forms, and this is a GL application.
I've tried using .NET's soundplayer but that incurs a huge delay of up to a second, and I can't set/access the position of the file.
I've looked into OpenTK and OpenAL but that seems way too complex to figure out.
Does anyone have any ideas?
THANKS!
Oh and worst case scenario I could also deal with playing WAV or OGG files instead, and if the play timing is accurate enough I wouldn't need access to the position of the audio.

OpenAL may seem complicated, but it sounds like the best solution to your problem. There's plenty out there on it, though most examples might be in other languages, but the API is the same. Perhaps this thread has some solutions as well.

Related

How can I play a .wav file using SharpDX DirectSound in a C# WPF project?

I want to be able to precisely control the timing of .wav files played in my program. I also want to be able to play more than one .wav file at the same time. The SoundPlayer was not good enough because I can't play two sounds at once, and even when I play different sounds consecutively, there is about a 1/8th second delay between each sound, which is unacceptable for what I am doing. I cannot find a way to add a Device using SharpDX.
You have a directsound sample in sharpdx, should get you started.
Also you can have a look at NAudio , which should also fit your needs and be a bit easier to use.

Playing video in a .NET application

Lately, I've been trying to setup a media center PC. I've played around with all the common media center applications like XBMC, Plex, Boxee, and WMC. But all of them have one issue or another. So I was thinking about writing my own application from scratch.
My problem is I have no experience with developing software that plays media such as videos or music. I'm also not interested in spending a huge amount of time trying to figure this out, considering all the different file formats and codecs out there. I'm really more interested in developing the database and library interface for my application and reusing someone else's control or code for actually playing the media.
One option I was thinking was to just control an existing media player externally. So for example you may browse for a video to play in my application, and then when you hit play it would fire up VideoLAN or some other popular video player.
However, I was wondering if there was an easy way to play video inside a .NET application. I'm looking for something that is capable of playing a wide variety of formats such as MKV files, and DVD ISOs. I'm more experience with WinForms, but was also thinking about using this project as an opportunity to learn WPF.
i've spent many years looking at playing video under wpf.
The short answer
There is no easy way to guarantee to be able to play a variety of formats under wpf ( mkv,dvd etc etc ) or under windows for that matter.
the long answer
If you are looking just to run this at home and not release it, install all the codecs you need and most of the formats will run via mediaelement in wpf.
Getting all the codecs to cooperate can sometimes be frustrating.
Now moving into slightly harder territory.
if you want to play DVD then you need to replace mediaelement with wpfmediakit
http://wpfmediakit.codeplex.com/
wpfmediakit gives a base library to get access to the low level directshow functionality.
There is already a code base for playing DVDs based on wpfmediakit.
Now moving onto the very hard territory.
if you want to distribute your application and have users be able to "just watch" most/all media formats means you need to be able to completely control their codecs, which generally means distributing the codecs with your package and building the directshow filter graph in code rather than let windows build it.
The easiest way is to use the existing .Net hooks to Microsoft's standard MediaPlayer:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.mediaplayer.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd562851%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
was trying myself a while ago for something to play media in winforms, and found out there is vlc wrappers for .Net, dunno how good they are as i gave up, but you can try
here is one them:
http://vlcdotnet.codeplex.com/
Thanks for all the great answers. But just found out that VLC can actually be controlled through HTTP. So I think I'm just going to use that to point an instance of VLC running with the HTTP interface at whatever file I want to play.

Windows Phone 7: Seeking in MediaElement

I'm working with a MediaElement for Windows Phone 7, and I want to make a simple slider that will allow a user to seek within an mp3 file. I can't quite get the behavior I want though. When I seek a short distance forward, it will work fine. But if I try to seek to the far end of the media, it will no longer play and go silent. Is there some sort of buffering that is occuring under the hood that is preventing seeking long distances? Has anyone overcome this issue or found a solution?
I've been referencing this post on msdn for info, but my URI is coming straight from media included in the xap file, not being transferred over a network protocol. I am also using the MediaElement.Position property to seek.
Have you tested that the media will play to those "far points" if you just let it play normally and don't try and skip ahead to them? If this fails too it could indicate a corrupt file.
How are you requesting the change relative to multiple changes to the slider? If you're making lots of changes to the position in quick succession this may be the problem. Are you checking CanSeek each time before you change the position? Does your slider allow for a single event to trigger a big "jump" or does it try and do lots of little ones?
It may also be worth copying the file to IsolatedStorage and trying to play it from there. I have vague recollections of this helping with something similar once before.

DirectShow DVD manipulation and capturing

I am new to DirectShow.
My intention was to develope a small application (C#) that handles video processing.
The main tasks i need are :
1 - Display video content from a DVD.
2 - Navigate to specific points of time in the video.
3 - Capture specific frames into still images and save them to files.
Sounded easy at first, but after reading thousands of blogs, forums and code samples i can't figure out how this can be done .
I am pretty sure these tasks have been implemented plenty of times, so if anyone has anything that can help i would be very happy to hear it.
As i am getting desperate on this issue, buying external DLLs or paying for some advice is an option.
Thanks.
Not sure if this will help, but I have a DvdPlayerElement control in my WPF MediaKit.
You must install an audio codec if you want audio as the built in one with Windows is locked down due to licensing.
perhaps you can wrap the MSVidWebDVD object, combined with some screen capture techniques [?] see also Extract frame from VOB(DVD) file
Thanks Jeremiah, I do know WPF MediaKit and tried working with it.
It is pretty cool, but does not allow all of the functionality available in DirectShow.
There are some events missing and the seeking operation does not seem to work for me.
I guess i can dig in the code and figure it out, but the time pressure won't allow it.
If you have an example of an application that accomplishes what i am looking for (display, seek, capture) i would be very happy to take a look.
Thanks again.

DirectShow EVR resizing window problem

So I've been looking into the world of media playback for windows and I've started making a C# Media Player using DirectShow. I started off using the VRM-7 windowed video renderer and it was brilliant except it had a couple of small problems (multi monitors, fullscreen). But after some research I found that it's deprecated and I should be using VRM9.
So I changed it to use VRM9 windowless then found out that was an old post rofl >_< so finally I'm using Vista/Win7 (or XP .net 3) Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR) which is apparently the most up to date Microsoft video renderer and has all the flashy performance/quality things added to it. (tbh I haven't noticed any difference but maybe I need a blue-ray or HQ video to notice it).
With using EVR everything is working fine except resizing the video. Its really laggy/choppy/teary and probably something to do with its frame queueing mechanism.
To demonstrate my problem
open up windows media player classic.
View -> Options -> Playback -> output
Chose the "EVR" DirectShow Video renderer
Now restart wmp class and play a video, while it's playing click and drag a corner to resize it. You'll notice its horribly laggy. This is the exact same problem i am having.
But if you chose "EVR Custom Pres. **" or EVR Sync **" resizing works beautifully! So i tried googling around for anything about EVR resizing issues and how to fix it but i couldn't believe how little i could find. I'm guessing "Custom Pres." stands for "Custom Presenter" which sounds like they made their own.
Also you'll notice on the right hand size when you swap between EVR and the other EVR's the Resizer drop down on the right greys out.
So basically I wan't to know how I can fix this retarded resizing problem and is there any decent documentation out there? There is a fair bit for VMR7/9 but not much for EVR. I downloaded the DirectX SDK which apparently has samples but it was a waste of 500mb of bandwidth as it had nothing relevant.
Perhaps there is some way to force it not queueing up frames if that is the problem?
If you want code say the word and I'll paste some in. But it's really quite simple and nothing much happens, i'm convinced it's a problem with the EVR renderer.
EDIT: Oh and one other thing, what does VLC use? If you go into vlc options and change the renderer to anything but default, they all suck. So is it using VMR7? Or its own?
I need to write my own Custom Presenter, which from the looks of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530107(VS.85).aspx is a relatively big task.
Guess i'll look at the sample and try to go from there

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