title: MediaPlayer - Can 'MediaElement' be improved to support more media formats and encodings? Codecs support
body: <p>MediaPlayer - Can 'MediaElement' be improved to support more media formats and encodings? </p>
  
  <p>Codecs support.</p>
  
  <p>Hello all. </p>
  
  <p>I am building a media player in <strong>c#</strong> and <strong>WPF</strong>. 
  All the examples that I find, more or less say the same thing, 
  "place a 'mediaElement' and the basic player buttons and there you go!"</p>
  
  <p>I thought that the mediaElement is essentially the windows media player, 
  but I already found cases where videos play, but show a black screen, while the audio track plays normally, and others where the scrubbing on the timeline takes a lot of time.
  Also I noticed that when I load a video in this type of player, <strong>K-lite codecs</strong> doesn't seem to load on the bottom right part of the windows taskbar like they usually do when I use VLC player or Media Player Classic for example. </p>
  
  <p>I 've already found another topic stating that: 
  "<em>The MediaElement is a control that's able to play only some file types. It's based on media player of windows but only on its core encoders. Its basically a bare-bones media player</em>"</p>
  
  <p>Do the issues I am having with the video playback have to do with limited codec support? Is it enough that I have K-lite codecs installed or is there something else that I am missing?</p>
  
  <p>Lastly, in the case that this is as good as mediaElement gets, what alternatives are there?
  I 've seen people open VLC through their players, 
  but I would like to know what other alternatives are available as well before I dive into that. I ve seen that Microsoft now has "<strong>Player Framework</strong>" available for Windows 8 for example, but is it only for windows 8?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you all in advance!</p>