WMV file plays on WP8 emulator - fails to play on device

Question

I've got a url to a WMV file, which I want to play with a MediaPlayerLauncher in my app. This works just fine in the emulator, but when I try this on my device, running the exact same code as in the emulator, I get the message "Sorry we cant play this file on your phone". My phone is a HTC 8x. Does anyone know why this may occur?

Answer 1

The video codec support for the emulator doesn't exactly match the device.

Also depending on the exact chipset on the phone the codec in a particular audio or video file may not be supported on any particular device. You can find more information on MSDN .

Answer 2

This worked for me:

When you attempt to play an AudioTrack from your app and there's no response at all (not even an Exception generated), play something from the phone's Music+Videos app (either a song or a podcast), and then try your app again.

(I'm still debugging this issue with the BackgroundAudioPlayer...I think I may be passing it a filename in ISO storage that hasn't finished downloading. On which the AudioPlayer is then choking, which I'm then failing to detect and recover from. I'll post here again on any progress made.)