Thread: List and comparison of available Video/DVD player plugins

These are the available Video/DVD player plugins for Ride Runner,
Requires (and included on) Version 7/1/2009 and newer:

• Built-In - The same old Built-In video player.
• MPC - Media Player Classic, fully re-built integration. Support 6.4.9.0 or newer.
• WMP - Windows Media Player. Supports WMP 7 and above.
• VLC - VideoLan. Supports VLC 1.0.0 and above.
• MSVid - Microsoft Video Control (DirectShow). Included with DirectX.

While they all can perform the same basic features for Video/DVD playback, they all differ in several other aspects, but specially on:

• What File Types they can play
• How much Memory is used
• What kind of performance is offered on playback (Startup/Load of Videos/DVD, etc)
• Whether DVD support is offered
• What zoom (aspect ratio) feature is offered
• What is required to use it (External applications, hardware specifications and/or settings)

Note: CPU load is not focused on this thread because it mostly depends on the Codecs installed on the machine or used/selected by the video player itself.

Below, there's a table that shows some information on each player. You should base your choice of player on your specific needs, considering the hardware you have, what you are used to, and the features you'd like to have. You should follow the install information on the documentation for each video player.

Ideally, you should try each player until you find one that suits you best -- regardless of the tests results shown below (performed on a Intel Centrino 1.2Ghz Processor w/ 1Gb Ram).

Selection of Video/DVD players:

The choice of Video/DVD player is based on RR.INI settings:

videoplayer=
dvdplayer=

Leaving them blank (like above) or omitting the lines, will tell RR to use the Built-in Player for Video and MPC for DVD (as usual). If you want the SAME player for video and for DVD, you may only specify the videoplayer line -- as long as the plugin supports DVD playback, RR will use it as well, otherwise it will use MPC as fallback. If you want a different plugin for DVD than for video, you should add the dvdplayer line to set the desired DVD plugin. To use the built-in player for Video and specify a DVD plugin (other than MPC), you should omit the videoplayer setting (or leave it blank) and set the dvdplayer with your desired DVD plugin.

For Developers

If you wish to make a new Video/DVD player plugin for RR, you can do so (in any language that supports COM) by following the model of the WMP plugin sources available to download on this same post. You just need to replicate the functions described in the .cls file. There are very few functions required to make it work. You should be aware of the "NoZoom" setting from RR.INI and, if set to True, you should maintain aspect ratio of the Video/DVD for playback -- You can obtain this easily with the following code (typically used on the Class_Initialize sub):

Code:

Dim RRSDK as Object
Dim NoZoom as Boolean

    Set RRSDK = CreateObject("RideRunner.SDK")
    NoZoom = LCase(RRSDK.getinfo("=$nozoom$")) = "true"
    Set RRSDK = Nothing