how to programatically play a video?

[George2]

Hello everyone,

I want to programtically play a remote (streamed) video using C#, the purpose is to test web sites performance/stress. No need to have any GUI, just using Media Player API to playback a speific video by URL is fine.

I searched for Windows Media Player API/SDK samples, but all are dealing with GUI, not what I wanted. Does anyone have any good samples to recommend?

thanks in advance,
George

[MNovy]

I'm not sure if your focus is correct, but:

Streaming videos is done mostly by a plug in inside the browser (e.g. QuickTime).,
So it is the browser's job to run a video.


If you want to check the performance you may be better with general network traffic check of the accessed URL (video).

[George2]

I am interested in "you may be better with general network traffic check of the accessed URL (video).". Do you have more information, like document or code?

My purpose is to create hundreds of connections to server, and each connection play some video on the site, and I want to measure the experience of each connection (end user) when there are hundreds of users connected to the server.

I'm not sure if your focus is correct, but:

Streaming videos is done mostly by a plug in inside the browser (e.g. QuickTime).,
So it is the browser's job to run a video.


If you want to check the performance you may be better with general network traffic check of the accessed URL (video).

regards,
George

[Arjay]

I searched for Windows Media Player API/SDK samples, but all are dealing with GUI, not what I wanted.

Why sweat the UI? When you create each connection, just use a media player instance and hide the UI. Look at this another way, presumably your users are going to use a UI to display the video, so your stress tests will be more like the real load if you simulate it as close as possible.

[George2]

Hi Arjay,

Why sweat the UI? When you create each connection, just use a media player instance and hide the UI. Look at this another way, presumably your users are going to use a UI to display the video, so your stress tests will be more like the real load if you simulate it as close as possible.

From your reply, I think you understand my requirement quite well. :-)

Do you have any simple sample recommendations for me to start-with? All the samples I found are too completed and I just need to render/play the video from server programatically.

regards,
George