Plugin Vs dll in C# application

[rarao]

Hi

I am developing a C# application that needs to display a video. I have gone through the topics on this forum and was able to achieve some success. However i have some basic questions on these two (plugin vs dll) approaches.

1. Which is better ? plugin or dll for a typical C# winforms application.
2. Is there any performance related benefits of one over the other?
3. Are plugins meant only for browsers (IE, mozilla etc)?

The motivation for asking the above questions is that i successfully implemented the dll approach and landed into some crashing issues (particularly in liblibmpeg2_plugin.dll and libaccess_udp_plugin.dll) while running 6 instances of libvlc objects using the libvlc.dll and libvlccore.dll using VLC version 1.0.2. under windows Vista 32 bit OS. However, plugins used in a web browser was comfortably able to stream 6 videos on a lesser configuration Linux machine.

I tried using plugins in my C# application using the following approach in that specific order

1. Added reference to axvlc.dll in C# project.
2. Registered axvlc.dll after lot of trouble...i had to copy axvlc.dll , libvlc.dll, libvlccore.dll and plugins folder into windows/system32 before regsvr32 could successfully register the axvlc.dll.
3. created a VLCpluginclass2 object "plgin" .....added a target using "plgin.addTarget("udp://@235.1.1.1:10000",null, <valid playlist mode>, 0);" and then played the video using "plgin.play()". The video plays for 1 sec before the application crashes..with typical uncomprehendable windows message...saying "windows is looking for solutions....".

I would appreciate if someone can give me the right perspective for the a) plugin vs dll comparison and b) how to use plugin in c# application (other than what i have done above)

rao