Xamarin Forms has quite a rich set of controls which work natively across platforms however a big gap in the functionality is the ability to play audio or video content.
You can create custom controls for Xamarin and from the platform-specific renderers you have full access to the APIs provided by that platform to create complex controls of your own. However on a couple of projects I’ve needed to display a video and it felt to me like a fairly standard control we take for granted when doing “native” development.
The good news is that you don’t have to do this yourself because I’ve put my control up onto GitHub and NuGet and it’s ready to roll for Android, iOS and of course Windows UWP. If you’ve used the Windows MediaElement you already know how to use it too.
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| <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> | |
| <ContentPage xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms" | |
| xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml" | |
| xmlns:local="clr-namespace:MediaPlayerSample" | |
| xmlns:forms="clr-namespace:InTheHand.Forms;assembly=InTheHand.Forms" | |
| x:Class="MediaPlayerSample.MainPage"> | |
| <StackLayout> | |
| <forms:MediaElement HorizontalOptions="Fill" VerticalOptions="Center" HeightRequest="240" x:Name="Media" AreTransportControlsEnabled="true" Source="http://video.ch9.ms/ch9/334f/891b78a5-642d-40b4-8d02-ff40ffdd334f/LoginToLinkedinUSingXamarinAuth_mid.mp4"/> | |
| </StackLayout> | |
| </ContentPage> |
Simply add the InTheHand.Forms NuGet package and add a namespace to your XAML and add the MediaElement control. You can do the basics straight from XAML, but you can add a Name to the control and interact with it from the code too. There is full documentation for the control online. If you have any issues/feature suggestions please post them to GitHub.
The player controls can be toggled using the AreTransportControlsEnabled property. The displayed controls will match the native appearance of the target platform. For example the sample above uses a link to a Channel9 video on Xamarin Auth by @HoussemDellai and you can see below how it is rendered on an Android app and a UWP desktop app:-
I’ve also been working on support for the ms-appx scheme for Source Uris allowing you use a common way of referring to files in the application package. This should be in the next NuGet release (after 1.0.2017.301) along with a legacy Windows Phone 8.1 renderer.
I hope you find this useful in adding media to your Xamarin Forms projects!
In The Hand Ltd 