I have a zip-archive containing pictures (jpg) and videos (mpg). I would like to show these pictures and videos in my application (C#) without having to unpack them to disc first. For the pictures I made a stream (System.IO.Stream) which I sent to a pictureBox and voila. The picture is shown without having to save it to disc. Now I would like to do something similar for the videos. But I can't seem to find any component that will accept a stream. The ones that I have looked at (DirectX and Windows Media Player) want a filename or a url. 

Does anybody know of a solution to this? Either making the contents of the zip archive available as a filename or url (without having to set up a webserver on the machine) or a component that will show video from a stream?

Hi,

Some video players will allow playing video from an archive.  This depends on a number of factors.  The cpu must be fast enough to decompress the video and play it at the same time.  Depending on the video resolution, a video could be playing fine and the other could skip frames. 

And it's not every video player that has the ability to play a video while it is being extracted from the archive.  The majority of the video players on the market don't have this feature while other video players will even have the capabilities to play a video, even if the video is splitted over several zip files.

Using Zip for .NET, you would have to know the filename to stream/extract (filename.avi), make a stream of the video, and have a player able to read the file while it's being extracted.  This is perfectly feasible, as long as you have a good player.

This being said, unless you want to group the videos together, in the same archive, you are not going to save a lot of space.  2%-3%, not more than this.   MP3, JPG, MPG, etc, are already very compressed. 

Best regards,

---

Ghislain
Technical Support and software developer
Xceed Software Inc.
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The reason for us having the videofiles in a zip is not because of compression but because of protection. We can password-protect the zip so that it is not easy to access the videos without using our program.

 I have been searching the Internet to find a video player that I can use in my .NET development that will accept a video as a stream, but I have not found any. If you could help me out by naming one I would be very happy.

 So far the only solution we have found is to use a  package that mounts the zip, but only so that it is available from within the application. Then we can use Windows Media Player to show the videos. But frankly, your packages are much nicer to work with. So if I can find a video player that can play from a stream I could throw out that other package. Please help me.