I tried to write a .AVI player a while back using the Video For Windows library, but I couldn't get it to work. The main problem I had was that for some reason it could not decompress the video I wanted to play. I found people asking about the same problem online, but no one knew the answer. I ended up not being able to complete my project because of that problem. I'm curious if there are any better options than Video For Windows. Or if I could just as easily manually parse the video file and extract the frames myself.
Note : I know about ffmpeg, but I'd rather not use it because of the license it's under.