I am excited to announce a cross-platform video player. This new Xamarin Forms component gives developers the ability to render the native video player for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone all from XAML, shared code, or a portable class library (PCL). I find video encoding and streaming to be a fun challenge no matter what I am developing for and was excited to learn there is currently no comprehensive solution to cross-platform video playback with Xamarin Forms.
Dec 15, 2014 Our Android Player is a high-speed hardware accelerated emulator, available on both Mac and PC, that integrates directly into Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio. Now, we’re exited to release a brand new update for the Android Player with several fixes and new features that will make developing Android apps even more enjoyable. Xamarin.Mac was created as a tool for Apple technology application development using the C# programming language. Xamarin.Mac, as with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android, gives developers up to 90% of code reuse across Android, iOS and Windows.
I am hoping developers will enjoy improved productivity when developing mobile applications requiring video because you can now control many aspects of the playback experience from shared code. For example, you can register for events (Playing, Paused, Stopped, TimeElapsed, etc.) all from a single shared code base. The goal is to provide video playback that’s easy to use without having to handle the idiosyncrasies of each platform’s media framework.
Getting Started
If you are a Xamarin mobile developer, the only thing you need to do to get a working native video player on every platform is to install the component following the getting started section. Literally the one line declaration below is sufficient to supercharge your apps with video.
Specifying the Video Source
You may notice the Source property takes a VideoSource object. This was built to have very similar design and behavior to Xamarin’s ImageSource class. You could literally follow the tutorial for working with images and just swap out the word ImageSource for VideoSource. This means you have the ability to specify a video’s file location as a local file system path, a remote URL or as an embedded resource from an assembly.
When working with embedded resources though, I took it one step further and made it a little more extensible when attempting to locate resources. The order of searching assemblies to find embedded resources when calling VideoSource.FromResource(“MyVideo.mp4”) has the same behavior as calling ImageSource.FromResource(…) but the entry assembly (your iOS, Android, or Windows Phone proxy application) is also searched in the event no other match is found.
Playing YouTube and Vimeo Videos
The major video hosting sites allow developers to play content hosted by them in the applications they build. The Xamarin Forms video player sample application (called Chill Player) comes with some convenience XAML markup extensions that can convert YouTube and Vimeo video ID’s into the playback stream URLs compatible with the video player on each platform.
It’s important to note that using direct stream URLs in this manner may be against the terms of use for these sites. As such, this experimental feature is merely a convenience and will likely see low priority support going forward. Both YouTube and Vimeo expose public APIs which you are encouraged to integrate for use with this video player component.
Trial
You can download the sample application and run it on all three platforms to try out the demo. The trial version limits video playback to 15 seconds. You can download the trial on Nuget.org. In trial mode, the video player just fails after 15 seconds of playback.
Support
If you need support and have purchased at least one copy of the component, you can open and browse tickets here.
Question or issue on macOS:
I’m a .NET developer and want to write an IOS & Android app in C#. I’ve had a read around Xamarin for Visual Studio which looks interesting if not a tad expensive!
Do you need a Mac to debug your code? Do you just need a networked Mac to actually deploy the app to the Store?
Is the best option just to buy a Mac and run Windows with VS in a VM or can I just use my windows machine, write & debug the code in Windows then just hook up to a networked Mac for final deployment?
How to solve this problem?
Solution no. 1:
Yes, you must have a Mac to do Xamarin.iOS development. The Mac is required for building as well as running the iOS simulator. You can either use it as a build server, and actually do your development in Visual Studio (either in a standalone PC, or on a VM running on your Mac), or you can do your development directly on the Mac using Xamarin Studio as your IDE.
Solution no. 2:
From May 2017, you can develop app without MAC.
Microsoft Xamarin introduce a Live Player. With Live Player, iOS apps can be deployed directly onto an iPhone or other iDevice from a PC running Visual Studio, where the code can then be tested and debugged.
WARNING The Xamarin Live Player Preview has ended. See discussion
See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awgZDL1a3YI
this is Live Player Get start section: Live Player
Note: The final build and submission to the App Store will still require a Mac
Device Requirements
The Xamarin Live Player app supports the following devices:
iOS
- iOS 9.0 or later.
- ARM64 processor.
- Check the App Store for a list of supported devices.
Android
- Android 4.2 or later.
- ARM-v7a, ARM-v8a, ARM64-v8a, x86, or x86_64 processor.
Limitations
There are some limitations on the things Xamarin Live Player can run, including the items below:
- Android user interfaces designed with AXML files are not currently supported.
- Some iOS storyboard features are not supported.
- iOS XIB files are not supported.
- Custom Renderers are not supported.
- Xamarin.Forms Effects are not supported.
- Embedded resources are not supported (ie. embedding images or other resources in a PCL).
- Limited support for reflection (currently affects some popular NuGets, like SQLite and Json.NET). Other NuGets are still supported.
- Some system classes cannot be overridden (for example, you cannot implement a subclass).
- Some platform features that require provisioning can’t work in the Xamarin Live Player app (however it has been configured for common operations like camera access).
- Custom targets and build steps are ignored. For example, tools like Fody cannot be incorporated.
Chirp Subsonic Xamarin Android
Solution no. 3:
You can use Xamarin Studio instead of Visual Studio and build iOS application by C#.
First install VMware Workstation and then download OS X image and run it by VMware.
Then Install tools on it and enjoy.
Tools :
EDIT : The following links are out dated, You must install Mac OS 10.10 in order to be able to install XCode 6.
iOS Tools that you need:
1) Mac OS X image for Windows
Note: Max OS X Installation Help:
http://www.sysprobs.com/easily-run-mac-os-x-10-8-mountain-lion-retail-on-pc-with-vmware-image
2) Mono:
http://download.xamarin.com/MonoFrameworkMDK/Macx86/MonoFramework-MDK-3.2.4.macos10.xamarin.x86.pkg
3) Xamarin Studio:
http://download.xamarin.com/studio/Mac/XamarinStudio-4.2.1-1.dmg
4) MonoTouch:
http://download.xamarin.com/MonoTouch/Mac/monotouch-7.0.4.209.pkg
5) Xcode
Solution no. 4:
Update 2018
Install VirtualBox
https://www.virtualbox.org/
Install MacOs 10.13 on VirtualBox
https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-high-sierra-virtualbox-windows/
Create or login with an apple account on the mac
Install XCode 9.0
https://download.developer.apple.com/Developer_Tools/Xcode_9/Xcode_9.xip
Enable Remote Login
System Preferences > Sharing > Remote Login > Enable for All Users
Configure VirtualBox with an additional network adaptor (host-only)
Visual Studio Android Sdk
In Windows > Visual Studio (Xamarin Project) > Pair with mac
Leapdroid
Enter the IPaddress of the second network adaptor
Let Visual studio install Xamarin IOS, IOS SDK, additional tools on the Mac
All set up.
Solution no. 5:
An option is to use a remote service to do this.
For example:
http://www.macincloud.com
Solution no. 6:
Anybody know that a Virtual-Machine is the solution! but when you want to have an OSX on windows it’s not really easy as you just talked about it.
it’s very important to find best OS ROM.
check it out here.
and you have to know that limitation is Apple’s doing, not Xamarin’s.