Chapter 12. Manipulating and creating media with MediaElement

One of the more popular uses of a mobile phone is as a media player. Developers have a variety of different options when building applications that play media. In chapter 7, we showed you how to integrate with the Music + Videos Hub and to make use of the XNA Framework and the BackgroundAudioPlayer to play audio. In this chapter we’re going to look at two Silverlight controls that can be used to play both audio and video from inside an application.

These controls are MediaElement, which plays downloaded media files, and SmoothStreamingMediaElement, which incrementally downloads media files as they’re being played. With these two controls you can get a full-featured media player with a few lines of code. In this chapter you’ll see how to implement a basic media player in Silverlight for Windows Phone using the MediaElement control. With this example you’ll learn how to render different media types supported by Windows Phone and control the playback. The media containers supported by Windows Phone through the MediaElement control include WAV, MP3, WMA, 3GP, 3G2, MP4, M4A, WMV, and M4V.

12.1. Building a media player with MediaElement

12.2. Manipulating the media stream with MediaStreamSource

12.3. Creating custom video

12.4. Creating custom audio

12.5. Streaming media clients

12.6. Summary