Embedding Youtube videos in WPF application

Question

I am trying to play a Youtube video right from my simple WPF application.

I have investigated several ways to do that:

Using WebBrowser control In this case seems you just need to apply the Youtube video URL to WebBrowser source field and just make a little changes in the URL itself, like:

Original URL = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxx
Changed URL = https://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxx
The other approach just suggests to use ShockWave Flash object, which basically should have pretty the same result (video tutorial below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=714w3HQDTcA

I have tried both cases and seems that the solutions are old, as I get the following error:

So the question is:

Is there any way to simply play a youtube video in WPF app, with or without the described soultions. Or maybe I am doing something wrong. Thank you.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 08 '19 at 14:11

2

The cause of your problem

When you're using the native WebBrowser control, remember that it's powered by Internet Explorer (not sure if Windows 10 uses Edge to handle that control), both outdated browsers that likely don't support the new YouTube player. YouTube switched its video player in favor of the new HTML5 one and flash stopped being supported thus, the ShockWave Flash Object not working.

A possible solution

What you can try to do is using a more modern embedded browser. In C#, your best option might be a CEF port to C#, CefSharp. CEF stands for Chromium Embedded Framework and, because Chromium is the base for Google Chrome, just keep the library updated and you'll always have support for the newest features in Web browsers.

answered Aug 08 '19 at 14:11

Humberto Gomes

139
1
10

I am marking this answer as an accepted, but please have in mind that CefSharp is unbelievably slow when used in wpf application. That is because the rendering is done in a bad way for WPF (they just render the whole screen bitmap by bitmap). – Karen Tsirunyan Aug 20 '19 at 07:04
@KarenTsirunyan sorry but I didn't know CEF was slow in WPF. You can try gecko (The web engine behind Mozilla Firefox) - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8778320/how-to-use-gecko-in-c-sharp – Humberto Gomes Aug 29 '19 at 20:25

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 28 '20 at 08:57

2

        string html = "<html><head>";
        html += "<meta content='IE=Edge' http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible'/>";

        html += "<iframe id='video' src= 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/{0}' width='640' height='360' frameborder='0' allow = \"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowFullScreen></iframe>";

        html += "</body></html>";
        this.webBrowser1.DocumentText = string.Format(html, txtboxLink.Text.Split('=')[1]);

This will work for me. Try this for your play button event.

answered Apr 28 '20 at 08:57

ChathurangaChandrasekara

21
6

Would you mind giving some details about how the code above solves the problem? This will help our understanding, thanks! – Serkan Pekçetin Apr 28 '20 at 09:22
Flash is dead, don't try to revive it. YouTube has explicitly disabled this capability and it won't work anymore. – ChathurangaChandrasekara Apr 28 '20 at 11:04
For web browser control, Url needs to be correct. [https://www.csharp-console-examples.com/winform/embed-and-play-youtube-videos-in-c-application/] @karen-tsirunyan – ChathurangaChandrasekara Apr 28 '20 at 11:11

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 11 '19 at 02:59

1

I usually do it this way:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/XXXXXX

XXXXX is your Video Code

check also this answer how do I embed a youtube video into a WPF MediaElement and save the video?

answered Sep 11 '19 at 02:59

Moustafa Khalil

116
1
3

Embedding Youtube videos in WPF application

3 Answers3

The cause of your problem

A possible solution

Linked