What is a good way to design a media player on Windows phone? [closed]

Question

Some friends and I are creating a Google music type of project in order to learn a few Microsoft technologies.

I am responsible for the Windows phone app and having it interact with WCF to get a music stream and play it. After reading, I have found many ways to play music including XNA, SoundEffect, MediaElement, and MediaPlayerLauncher.

Having such a variety to choose from, I am stuck on what would be best for the job.

1. The XNA player seems fully featured but requires me to initialize the gaming-like update loop for it to work. This seems like a waste of resources.
2. SoundEffect seems geared towards sound effect.
3. Media Element seems okay, and Launcher even has a ui!

I am trying to stay away from writing my own player so which one should I choose? I am okay with writing some functionality, but it would be nice to have queuing, scrubbing, etc built in. Any of you have success with something similar to this?

Answer 1

Don't use SoundEffect for playing streams. It is for playing short WAV files as sound effects or other incidental noises in an application.

If you want to create your own UI or encapsulate the player inside your own application then the MediaElement is the way to go.

If you want the simplest option possible then go with the MediaPlayerLauncher. This will also give you the standard look and feel and UX that your users will be familiar with.

Answer 2

If you don't want create your own player take a look at Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework. This project has built-in player with UI controls. However this project is designed to play streams from IIS Smooth Streaming, but you cant try to play your streams. If this approach fail, then using MediaElement is good option as Matt Lacey noted.