How To Play an .AVI Video File in Full Screen in Visual Basic

This article demonstrates how to play an .AVI (video) file in full screen from Visual Basic for Windows. When you play an .AVI file using the full screen, the color palette focus is set to the .AVI file only. No dithering of colors occurs because there are no other windows in the background to capture the color palette.

This example uses the mciSendString application programming interface (API). Your computer must be able to play .AVI files for this sample to work.

Step-by-Step Example

1. Create a new Visual Basic Standard Exe project.
2. Add a CommandButton (Command1) to Form1, and set its Caption property to "Play Video."
3. Add the following line of code to the General Declarations section of Form1:

         Private Declare Function mciSendString Lib "winmm.dll" Alias _
           "mciSendStringA" (ByVal lpstrCommand As String, ByVal _
           lpstrReturnString As Any, ByVal uReturnLength As Long, ByVal _
           hwndCallback As Long) As Long
   
   					

4. Add the following lines of code to the Command1 Click event procedure:

         Sub Command1_Click()
           '// --- Modify FILE_TO_OPEN constant as appropriate ---
           Const FILE_TO_OPEN = "C:\winnt\clock.avi"
           Dim strCmdStr As String
           Dim lngReturnVal As Long
           strCmdStr = "play " & FILE_TO_OPEN & " fullscreen "
           lngReturnVal = mciSendString(strCmdStr, 0&, 0, 0&)
         End Sub
   
   					

5. Press the F5 key to execute the sample code.
6. Click the Play Video button to watch the video full screen. The video will last for a few seconds and then return to the Visual Basic environment.