Embedding videos in Qt maya tools

I have been meaning to post this for some time because figuring this out has taken me quite some time and maybe someone out there finds this useful.

Qt has a media library called Phonon but it seems like maya doesn't ship with the necessary backend dll for some reason (maybe something to do with licensing?) If you ever tried this you will basically get a black-scren video player.


This missing dll file contains all the necessary functionality to decode media files so if you would like to embedd audio or video in your Qt tools you have to place the precompiled phonon_ds9d4.dll into <mayadir>\qt-plugins\phonon_backend
(source:  https://ilmvfx.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/how-to-make-phonon-work-in-maya-qt-and-pyqt4-compiling-for-maya2014-for-windows/)


Just make sure you have changed the path to your media file on the bottom of this script and you have the necessary codec installed on your machine. You can read more about what is possible on the official PySide documentation

See below for sample code of a simple videoplayer...