How play .mp3 files loaded from a URL in TMediaPlayer with Firemonkey?

Question

Is there any way to play .mp3 files from a URL using TMediaPlayer with Firemonkey in Delphi XE7?, this code doesn't works;

MediaPlayer1.FileName := 'http://wwww.some_site.com/some_song.mp3';
MediaPlayer1.Play;

it throws an exception of File not found, so I suppose that TMediaPlayer works only with local files, isn't it?, please, any helps it would be very appreciated, thanks very much.

Answer 1

When setting the TMediaPlayer.FileName property, it simply extracts the file extension from the end of the specified path (everything after, and including, the final . character), locates a registered codec for that extension, and then tells the codec to load the FileName value as-is. The codec returns a TMedia object which TMediaPlayer then uses to play/control the media as needed. By default, FireMonkey only implements TMedia classes for local files.

You would have to implement a custom TMedia-derived class to handle streaming media, and a custom TCustomMediaCodec-derived class (registered for a custom file extension using TMediaCodecManager.RegisterMediaCodecClass()) to create your TMedia class. Then you can assign a URL to TMediaPlayer.FileName that ends with your extension (the real URL would not, so your codec would have to strip it off before accessing the URL), eg:

MediaPlayer1.FileName := 'http://wwww.some_site.com/some_song.mp3.myext';