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Microsoft recently released another control for the .NET MAUI platform: MediaElement. This is one of the components of the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit that allows audio and video playback within .NET MAUI applications.

MediaElement gives you control over media playback in your .NET MAUI application and is a continuation of MediaElement from the Xamarin Community Toolkit, created by community member Peter Foot. The version of MediaElement moved to .NET MAUI was redesigned from scratch. This kept certain elements and improved some other parts, especially on Android.

In the case of Android, it uses ExoPlayer as the platform equivalent, replacing the Android MediaPlayer that worked with Xamarin. This automatically gained a lot of additional functionality right out of the box, such as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) video playback.

iOS and macOS leverage the AVPlayer platform, as on the Xamarin platform. Tizen is also unchanged using Tizen.Multimedia.Player.

In order to start using MediaElement, it is necessary to install the CommunityToolkit.Maui.MediaElement NuGet package, which is a separate package from the main Community Toolkit package. Once the installation is complete, the developer should navigate to the MauiProgram.cs class and add the following initialisation line to MauiAppBuilder:

public static MauiApp CreateMauiApp()
{
    var builder = MauiApp.CreateBuilder();
    builder
        .UseMauiApp()
        .UseMauiCommunityToolkitMediaElement()

    return builder.Build();
}

In a comment on the release announcement, Abdelmounaim Elhili asked if it is possible to use this control in a .NET MAUI Blazor application. Gerald Vesluis, software engineer at Microsoft on the .NET MAUI Team, answered:

You can’t mix a .NET MAUI component into Blazor, what you could do however is navigating to a .NET MAUI page which then has the MediaElement to play the actual media. I have a video about mixing Blazor Hybrid and .NET MAUI here that should give you some idea.

The announcement of this control received a positive response from the community. Among others, Gagik Kyurkchyan, Xamarin/.NET MAUI consultant, wrote:

Thank you so much!! That’s a major achievement! I remember the time when we needed a good media player in Xamarin.Forms, we had to go commercial. So, it’s a significant achievement indeed, I can’t wait to try it!

All current MediaElement features are available on the documentation page. Vesluis also published a video outlining the basics of how to get started with MediaElement.