I'm making a Windows Form application that is supposed to play an animated gif while playing music.
I used SoundPlayer, and everything worked flawlessly. Then I found out I can't play multiple audio files with SoundPlayer, which was a problem (Background music AND effects needed).
So I looked a little bit into DirectSound, but my application froze everytime I did anything DirectSound related (Device, Buffer...).
So now I'm trying out WMP, I was happy at first, but when I enabled a GIF (Transparent, in case it matters), the music stopped in less than a second while you could see the GIF to stop for a frame or so, like it's loading something heavy. And this happens every time that audio and GIF are playing at the same time, no matter if one of them started in advance. When I used SoundPlayer, I could play 20 animated GIFs at once with no effect on audio.
To sum it up:
SoundPlayer = Only one audio file, unacceptable
DirectSound = Freezes for some reason (Maybe worth trying again? I'd like to put focus of this question on WMP though, I lost the code anyway)
WMP = Won't play along nicely with animated GIFs, which are required.
I tried playing both .wav and .mp3 file, no difference. I added the wmp.dll reference before.
using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Media;
private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var player = new WMPLib.WindowsMediaPlayer();
player.URL = "song.wav";
pictureBox1.Visible = true;
}
Is there something I should know about WMP? Can you recommend some other method? It does seem that the audio stops when the pocess reaches certain memory usage. It's steady on about 45 MB, but once I play the audio file it starts increasing, and plays until it reaches about 48 MB when it stops and returns to 45 MB.
Thanks for taking your time and helping me in any way.
EDIT: I was using a GIF picture with resolution of 500x500 which I used SizeMode=StretchImage on to actually make it appear smaller (200x200). In this case, the music played for about 0.2 seconds. I resized the resource picture to 100x100, using StretchImage to make it appear as 200x200 again, and the music played for about 8 seconds, about 4 seconds if I loaded two GIFs at once. Changing the .mp3 bitrate to make it just 170KB didn't help at all. I mean my Google Chrome takes 3GB of my memory and still plays multiple videos just fine, while my Form is taking not even 50MB and struggles. Surely there must be a way to play GIF and a song. Is there some kind of MemoryAssignLimit property? Or does WMP simply fail when it comes to bigger resources? Is it a limitation set by WinForms?
