Pro WPF in C# 2010: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 4

26.2. The MediaPlayer

The SoundPlayer, SoundPlayerAction, and SystemSounds classes are easy to use but relatively underpowered. In today's world, it's much more common to use compressed MP3 audio for everything except the simplest of sounds, instead of the original WAV format. But if you want to play MP3 audio or MPEG video, you need to turn to two different classes: MediaPlayer and MediaElement. Both classes depend on key pieces of technology that are provided through Windows Media Player.

The MediaPlayer class (found in the WPF-specific System.Windows.Media namespace) is the WPF equivalent to the SoundPlayer class. Although it's clearly not as lightweight, it works in a similar way—namely, you create a MediaPlayer object, call the Open() method ...