Video screensaver

On my old XP pc I used to have a video screensaver, where I could enter a list of filenames of movies that then would be played on all connected monitors. Very cool! I used to collect all the trailers of CG movies I could get and use that list for the screensaver.

It's not the one I used, but apparently microsoft even made an official video screensaver (for XP). Now on windows 7 I'd like the same, and it should be possible according to this site. I tried but failed to accomplish this with the "windows live essentials".

So I wrote one myself. It turns out that a windows screensaver is very easy to write. I also messed around with various video playing methods in C#, using directx or directshow but none of them were as easy as using a simple media element from the WPF. Since I wrote this for .Net 3.5 that functionality is available.

Only downside to the media element is that it's not easy to synchronize them, so there is a small difference in the starting point of the movies on all screens. But most of the time it is small enough to ignore. It's something that I still want to fix so I might write an update on this post.

If you like you can download it here. The configuration is simple: turn on or off the audio, and provide a folder where to look for files. It only searches for .mov, .avi and .wmv files and does not search recursively. It could use some extra testing so if you run into trouble, you know how to find me :)

Installation: unzip the scr file to a location you like, right-click it and select 'Install'. And you need the .Net 3.5 framework of course.

Edit:

I uploaded an update with some bugfixes: the screensaver used to crash if you specified an empty path to search for videos, and there was an issue with the media element on my and steven's laptop if our extra monitor was connected. It is a known issue with Microsoft but it seems they do not bother to fix it. Luckily there is a workaround.

Edit 2:

By request, here is the link to the git repository I've set up. I converted the project to a vs 2012 solution; somehow I don't have the small sync issue anymore, but I suspect that this is because of my newer graphics card that I have in the meantime.