Play Audio and Video in .NET MAUI apps with the new MediaElement
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Play Audio and Video in .NET MAUI apps with the new MediaElement
One of the most anticipated controls for .NET MAUI has been released; MediaElement. With MediaElement you can easily play audio and video from within your .NET MAUI app, in this post you’ll learn everything you need to know about this first version and the plans we have for the future!
What is MediaElement?
With MediaElement you gain a powerful control that allows you to play multimedia inside of your .NET MAUI app.
You might already know MediaElement from the Xamarin Community Toolkit where it was added by the amazing work from community member Peter Foot. While that version was already pretty good, it also had room for improvement, especially on Android.
That is why, when porting MediaElement to .NET MAUI, we have rebuilt everything from the ground up. This way we could make sure to keep all the parts that are already good, while improving on the things that could use some love.
Under the hood
For Android we have chosen to use ExoPlayer as the platform counterpart, replacing the Android MediaPlayer that we used for Xamarin. This way we automatically gain a lot of extra features that are available to us out of the box, like playing HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) videos, great looking platform transport controls, and many other things.
On iOS and macOS we’re using the platform AVPlayer as we did for with Xamarin’s MediaElement as well. Also the Tizen one is unchanged using the Tizen.Multimedia.Player.
Now that .NET MAUI builds on top of WinUI instead of UWP, we’re using the WinUI’s brand new MediaPlayerElement here. While this control is also very young to WinUI, it is already very complete and looking promising.
Support for different media formats differ between platforms (and potentially what codecs you have installed), but by using the platform native media players we leverage all the power, and related optimized performance, for each operating system.
Gerald Versluis