are there any ways to play media files inside a WinForms application without having to struggle with VLC controls or similar?
What I'd like to do is to open movies or audio files inside, say a panel, and then be able to pause, resume and stop the playback.
The only way of doing that (as I've found) is to embed VLC inside my applications, which is quite frustrating as VLC usually fails to play anything (maybe I'm doing it totally wrong though).
Anyway, I'd be happy if someone pointed me to a easy-to-use library or similar that just took care of the playback for me, (mostly) bug free
You should probably utilize DirectX for this. Alternatively, I have seen a solution using Silverlight, where Silverlight resides in a hosted web browser panel. A very dirty hack, but would be slightly more cross-platform if that's an issue. But, DirectX is where you should begin: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb324497%28v=vs.85%29.aspx