I started with Zorin a few months ago, and posted a question about recommended h/w configuration back in October. I am now running Zorin successfully and are looking for equivalent apps that I use on my Windows computer.
I sometimes develop apps in Windows using Visual Studio 2022 in C#. I tried a very simple forms app that contains a button and displays Hello World when clicked. This app works fine in Zorin with Windows App Support installed.
One app uses Windows Media Player to play video files; however, when I added Media Player to my simple Hello World app and ran it in Zorin, it crashed. The message just says that it encountered a critical error.
Since all I added to the app was the Media Player. I know for certain that this was the cause. Does anyone have any experience with developing a Windows Forms app with Media Player and ran it successfully in Zorin?
Or, has anyone developed an app in Windows using VS 2022 C# that plays a video file and have run it successfully in Zorin OS?
Currently, I am looking for information, but this seems to be a rare problem. I would think that someone has been able to play video files in Zorin using a Windows app. Thank you for your time and assistance. Saga
Unfortunately, I have no Idea how to help You. Instead, I have a Question: Why do You use the Windows Media Player on Linux? Does it suit You the best? Or didn't You find a fitting Alternative?
Under the hood most Windows application support uses Wine. There are different Wine configurations that include different features found on Windows. The default one does not contain all the pre compiled or proprietary/licenced codecs or plumbing that Windows ships for mediaplayer and third party apps. (Kind of the same problem I had with certain games crashing to desktop on Windows 10 N for trying to play a cutscene.)
I don't really know enough to break it down into a step by step guide unfortunately. I manage some of my Wine stuff through Bottles so maybe that can be a good starting point to look for tutorials. Even if you set up Wine with support for more media codecs you might still miss certain DLL files that haven't been reverse engineered so you might have to joink them from a windows install where your demo app worked. Note this might not be allowed by Microsoft's terms and conditions, but if those hold any legal weight depends on your local laws. There are definitely tutorials for getting Windows Media Player itself running inside of Wine so that can be a good starting point, your application probably needs some of the same files added to the Wine environment. From what I can see some of the follow up step involve sourcing and running a bunch of .exe or .msi installers inside the wine environment like on an N edition of W10 or W11.
I don't have experience with fixing your specific problem because so much stuff is automated now with Proton, it is aimed at games but Proton is also just using custom Wine environments and can run normal Windows applications. Besides Steam it is also available through UMU-Launcher. The problematic game for me back on Windows (so not playing on Zorin or any other Linux, but Windows itself) actually runs flawlessly for most people using Proton. But some people have different hardware and Linux OS so had to use WineTricks to "Install a Windows DLL or component" and then select "wmp11" for media player. This fixes the crashing cutscenes in Act of Aggression because the gamedeveloper incorrectly assumed every copy of Windows has the video codec installed and that it would never throw an error. (They could have just skipped the cutscene without crashing if they had known about Windows 10/11 N.)
Thanks for the follow up. Happy to answer. Currently, I have app that we use at at science shows (mostly STEM stuff for libraries and schools). The app, at the end, plays a 2 or 3 second video.
It is written in C# under Visual Studio 2022 and uses Media Player. Up to now, I have always used a Windows device to run it. I am looking at the possibility of using a Linux computer for this.
I thought it would be easy enough, but for some reason the app crashes in Linux. Since I am fairly new to Linux, I am having trouble determining what the issue is, and how to correct it.
If curious, here is a short walk through of the app:
I don't have your game to test things with but running winetricks myself I got a warning that the packages it has are mostly 32 bits but my wine environment was set up as 64. So even if I install wmp9 wmp10 or wmp11 it might not be able to load the 32bit DLLs if the program itself is 64 bits or compiled with AnyCPU in visualstudio, you have to compile the game targetting x86 instead. But that only works out if your game can actually compile in x86 in the first place.