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This project creates a fully "Designable" Silverlight Video Player. This is not to be confused with a "Skinable" Video Player. A Skinable Video Player allows you to change the look and feel of the existing controls of the Video Player. A Designable player, allows a Designer to use ANY set of controls to implement the Video Player. For example, a Designer could replace all the buttons with a single dial that a user rotated into different positions, or they could change the method a user uses to select from the list of available videos. This can be done in Expression Blend without writing any code.

This project demonstrates an implementation of the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern to create a fully "Designable" Silverlight Video Player. This is not to be confused with a "Skinable" Video Player. A Skinable Video Player allows you to change the look and feel of the buttons that control the player. A Designable player allows a Designer to use ANY set of controls to implement the Video Player.

You see, the SMF itself is essentially a set of controls…but not an ‘app’ itself that you can just consume the binary.  What I did was basically create a new Silverlight application myself with one simple element: Player.  This way I could implement what I needed for my use.  The first thing I wanted was to have a simple XAP that I’d be able to load parameters in…very much like we did for SL Video Player on codeplex.  To make essentially the player have a flexible use model.  I could host the player anywhere and just feed it media to play.

Creating a basic video player is straight forward (link 1 | link 2), have a button to play, a way to control the volume, a scrubber to show the position of playback, and of course an area to view the video.  Once you get beyond the basic requirements, the “basic video player” becomes very involved.

Adding video to Silverlight projects ia as simple as placing a media element control from the assets panel on the stage and setting the media element’s source to a video file.

Crocusgirl has posted a list of her Silverlight Video Player Notes.

Note: This article is submitted by David for Silverlight Contest: Write and Win.Thanks a lot, David! Hello All, Please drop a comment if you like it.

Silverlight sure has come a long way since the days of “WPF/E.” With its most recent release, Silverlight 2 Beta 2, it has truly proven itself to be one of the best toolsets for Rich Internet Applications, and has effectively achieved its original goal of being an Internet version of WPF. The power and possibilities behind Silverlight are endless. However, with the continuous stream of alpha and beta releases, there are many breaking changes that appear. Newcomers to Silverlight and developers upgrading to the newest versions may have trouble learning all the ropes of the new 2 Beta 2 version.

Source Code: VideoPlayer.zip