How to make MediaElement work as good as AxWindowsMediaPlayer?

Question

I need a very simple video player in my C# app. It only has to loop a video from file and nothing more. Since I'm developing a WPF application, I've tried to use System.Windows.Controls.MediaElement . It has all the functions I need, but works quite poor: I've played some full HD videos on it, and it's always lagging and spiking.

To make sure, it's not my app problem, I've created 2 test applications. The first in a WinForms borderless 1920x1080 window with only AxWMPLib.AxWindowsMediaPlayer control. And the second in a borderless WPF window of the same size with System.Windows.Controls.MediaElement .

Then I run 2 videos on both of players. Here are their specs:

1: 1920x1080, 12000kb/s, 25 FPS, wmv

2: 1920x1080, 5730kb/s, 25 FPS, mp4

On AxWindowsMediaPlayer everything looks fine. But MediaElement seems to drop some frames and ignore vertical sync (it's possible to see parts of one frame on another during fast scene changes). So, it's completely unsuitable and shouldn't be like that, but I've found nothing about the problem in Microsoft official docs (they only suggest to use MediaElement instead of AxWindowsMediaPlayer in WPF apps). Is it possible to make it work more smoothly or using an additional WinForms Form with AxWindowsMediaPlayer is the only solution?

Answer 1

It was written over five years ago (look up James Dailey messages in the thread), there were possibly some improvements but overall I suppose the statements are still in good standing. I will pick up some relevant quotes:

As you know the WPF environment is constructed from the ground up to offer developers a very rich “graphics first” environment. The MediaElement in particular was designed to allow you to mix video with various other UI components seamlessly. This solution will give you the flicker free, “draw over video” solution that you are looking for. The best part is you can do all of this in C#. The bad part of this solution is that the MediaElement is not designed for displaying time sensitive media content. In other words, the MediaElement is notorious for dropping and delaying the display of video frames. There are ways to minimize this such as using SD rather than HD content, use a video accelerated codec, etc.

also:

Unfortunately you can't really tell the WPF MediaElement to never drop frames. The term we use for this class of issues is “disparate clocks”. In this case WPF is updating the screen at a certain rate (clock 1). The MediaElement (based on WMP) is cranking out video frames at a slightly different rate (clock 2). Given the underlying technologies there is currently no way to synchronize the two clocks and force them to “tick” at the same rate. Since the display will only be updated according to the WPF clock, multiple frames of video may be sent from the MediaElement to WPF between clock ticks. Because of this the MediaElement may appear to drop frames. This is a very common problem in multimedia development and there is no simple solution.

Windows Media Player uses Media Foundation and DirectShow APIs which power media playback with high quality video experience.