Videos that open in Windows Media Player but not in VideoComponent

[ZioGuido]

I’m making an app that should play some videos, and I’m experiencing a strange issue. There are some videos that open in Windows Media Player but not in VideoComponent; I am trying on 3 different computers, all three running Windows 10 with pretty much the same software/hardware setup, only on one of these I can open all videos; on the other two PCs, the exact same video files will still open in WMP but not in my Juce app. Is there a reason for this? What am I missing?

[daniel]

There is a good answer here:

Unsupported stream and h264

Hi Daniel, thanks for your in depth answer! The thing is: Windows Media Player can playback the files! So the codec is actually installed! So the problem must be somewhere else. I will try to sum up what we’ve found out: We know that JUCE wraps OS capabilities in order to play back video files I think Windows provides to approaches for media playback: the first is Direct Show (older/outdated) and the second is “Windows Media Foundation” (current). Unfortunatly JUCE uses Direct Show. Windows…

TL;DR: WMP uses a more modern framework “Windows Media Foundation”, but JUCE uses an old “Direct Show” widget.
It is not known if and when JUCE updates to Media Foundation.

There is a feature request that @t0m linked, but it is not specified, if that would encompass video as well, since it says AudioFormatReader:

AudioFormatReader - AAC - MP4 Reader For Windows

I understand there are licensing issues with the AAC encoder, however the lack of native Windows support for reading AAC/MP4 files is a significant limitation. This has been at the TOP of my personal JUCE ‘Wish List’ for quite some time

[ZioGuido]

Thanks for your answer Daniel. I saw that post but I am experiencing a different situation, whereas on 1 of my 3 PCs I can open the videos and I was trying to understand what was in this PC that’s missing in the others. Meanwhile, after some investigation, I found that the PC that can show the videos has a codec package installed called Haali Matroska Splitter, which I must have installed some 2 years ago and can’t just remember for what reason. Anyway, installing this package on the other PCs enables the playback of videos in my Juce App.

[daniel]

Glad you found it. I was also surprised that the Media Foundation and Direct Show use different encoder APIs, so one needs to check for wich API an encoder is installed. I should have mentioned that.