I'm trying to start getting into some more intensive programming projects on my own time to practice my programming and try and build up somewhat of a resume for myself. Anyways I want to create a media player completely from scratch something like VLC player but not as intense. Anyways i'm trying to find any information that would help me out. UI and graphics for this I think I have down and could handle but the actual opening of the media files, and playing them, and how they work, and in general how I would go about creating a programming like this I need some help with.
You'll want to Google "filetype specification". For example: here's the spec for an mp4.
Video encoding is everywhere, and if you master it you can probably sit pretty writing code for any online streaming service (Twitch, Netflix, Youtube, etc).