FFmpeg supports playing media streams from pipe. Pipe is a protocol in FFmpeg. To use it, you just need to replace the file name with 'pipe:'. for example
cat hello.avi |player pipe:
It also supports streams from file number
pipe:number
'number' can be 0, 1, 2, .... 0 is stdin, 1 is stdout and 2 is stderr. If 'number' is empty, it means stdin.
Using pipe in AVPlayer class is almost the same. Just use "pipe:N" as file name.
player \\.\pipe\name
FFmpeg is powerful, do you think so?