1

We're currenty building a little company presentation application for USB sticks that is used to display PDF files regardless of any PDF reader installed on the system. That works quite well, so we now also want to show videos directly inside the application. As we cannot ensure that the customers system is able to play the video file, I'd like to include everything that is neccessary to play the video regardless of the system configuration.

Before I reinvent the wheel - is there a preferred way to do so? Would another video format offer more possibilities? The target OS is supposed to be Windows XP up to Windows 8 and .NET 2.0. Is there any framework/assembly that I could use to become independent of any prerequisites on the target system? Thanks for your recommendations and thoughts on this!

Rob
  • 11,492
  • 14
  • 59
  • 94

1 Answers1

0

Playing videos requires software to transform the video data into moving images. Unless you want to take on the mammoth task of writing your own MP4 decoder, you'll have to rely on what the user has installed.

Wikipedia lists Windows Media Player versions here. Version 12 is the only one to support MP4 out-of-the-box. That means your Windows XP and Vista users are going to need a third-party codec.

Spivonious
  • 718
  • 7
  • 20