[Windows 8] Please implement the PlayTo feature in your media apps
- by Benjamin Roux
One of the greatest feature in Windows 8 apps is the ability to stream the video/photos/music you’re playing to any DLNA capable device in your network. Meaning that if you’re watching a movie on Netflix on your brand new Surface tablet in your garden, you can continue to watch it without interruption on your TV if you decide to go back inside ! Isn’t that awesome? The best thing is that it takes very few lines to implement that in an app and it’s very easy. You just have to subscribe to one event and feed the EventArgs with the stream you want to display. You can either stream a video/music from a MediaElement/MediaPlayer (see PlayerFramework on CodePlex) or from a simple Image control. Code’s better than text so I invite you to go the sample code of the PlayTo feature on the msdn (it features code for JS, C# and C++). So if you’re developing an app capable of playing video, music or just display some photos, please implement the PlayTo, it will bring a plus to your app.