Thread: what video backend to use?

*cough*

Originally Posted by Grayscale

As a few of you know I'm writing my own carpc software, and for the dvd/divx part of it i was wondering what would be the best program to leech off of. I was thinking about windows media player, but wanted you guys's opinions. Thanks!

Well if you aren't using WMP for your MP3 playback then adding it for your DVD/DiVX will just blot the hell out of your app.

What are you using for MP3 playback?

Winamp

If you like working with COM then wmp is definitly the way to go. If your doing it in VB the wmp control is probably the easiest way to go. If you want the most control over the application and want to do things like draw complex stuff on the moving video then your probably better off just using the DirectShow portion of DirectX, although doing it this way in anything other then C++ would be more of a challenge then I would want to undertake.

Not working with COM...I'll probably check out the wmp control for VB. What about suggestions for DVD? WMP doesn't do DVD right?

How about VLC? Its a feebe and it supports just about everything under the sun.

DirectShow is the best way to go. You won't get the bloat of an external app like WMP or Winamp and it will automatically use the DVD playback filters of a DVD app like WinDVD or PowerDVD.

You should be able to use it from VB. I'll post some sample code for you in a minute.

Originally Posted by xanimal

How about VLC? Its a feebe and it supports just about everything under the sun.

I looked into this, but I couldn't find good documentation for the development library. Let me know if you know of anything.