Video and Media

Smooth Streaming compability to WMP

MontySL — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:16:50 GMT

Hi *,

we have WMV-encoded videos which we stream with Windows Media Player plugin.

We now want to use Silverlight 3 using Smooth Streaming. Can I still use the WMP Plugin to play the Smooth Streaming content?

Thank you

Smooth streaming only plays on on low bit rates

chris geary — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:56:28 GMT

I'm having a lot of problems playing my HD 720p smooth streaming videos - only playing on low bit rates.

I have very fast broadband and can play 4Mbps WMV and normal silverlight (non-smooth streaming) with no problems or buffering.

However when playing my own encoded smooth streaming videos I can only get a low quality playing bit rate.

Other people have tested my smooth streaming videos and some people can get them to work ok, playing the high bit rate.

I have also tested the smooth streaming videos in severial internet cafe's but get a low quality bit rate experience, and sometime the video is also very jerky.

The strange thing is, when I play the BigBuckBunny from my server, it plays on my PC's fine (with high bit rate quality).

What could be causing this to happen? Is there any info on the web I can research further?

Any advise would be great.

Here a quick Summery:

Doesn't play well: http://67.15.149.7/Video3/

Doesn't play well: http://67.15.149.7/Video2/

Plays correctly: http://67.15.149.7/Big_Buck_Bunny/

Plays correctly: http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming

P.S. I'm using Expression Encoder 3 (default settings) and have tested both VC1 & H.264, in both CBR and VBR.

"Silverlight Media Framework" released on CodePlex

Alan Cobb — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:41:15 GMT

This looks interesting.

Today (Nov. 18, 2009) during PDC 2009 Microsoft released the "Silverlight Media Framework" (SMF) on CodePlex. This was apparently developed by Vertigo.

See: http://smf.codeplex.com/

Alan Cobb
www.alancobb.com/blog

Can Silverlight play unsupported media formats, e.g. MP4, FLV

Tim Acheson — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:08:37 GMT

Is MediaStreamSource versatile enough to allow developers to provide support for otherwise unsupported media formats, such as FLV? If not, could this be achieved through some other aspect of Silverliht 2.0 or even Silverlight 3.0?

“The Media Stream Source is a powerful API that's responsible for enabling another much-talked-about feature: adaptive streaming of media. Adaptive streaming allows the player application to choose the bit rate of the media based on available client bandwidth and CPU resources.]Media Stream Source allows the developer to specify a custom method of retrieving media data, the only requirement being that the final video and audio streams be presented to Silverlight runtime in a format that Silverlight can decode (VC-1, WMA, MP3, etc). This allows extensible support for otherwise natively unsupported file formats (i.e. MP4, Matroska, Ogg), protocols (i.e. Shoutcast) and delivery methods (i.e. adaptive streaming, P2P). Microsoft first publicly showcased the power of Media Stream Source by powering the NBC Olympics website with their own implementation of adaptive streaming.”

http://silverlighttutorialsweb.blogspot.com/

“MediaStreamSource is a piece of the Silverlight runtime that removes a the influence of a media file's container, giving developers direct access to APIs for manipulating encoded elementary audio and video streams. … Basically it can enable you as the developer to implement file parsers/etc. in managed code instead of Silverlight, enabling support beyond the native built-in formats for media. There hasn’t been much information about these types of topics, and I’d agree that for the mainstream, they may be a bit more advanced media scenarios for when the default containers and formats aren’t enough for your use.”

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/10/01/mediastreamsource-sample-with-source-code.aspx

“This new Silverlight 2 feature enables file parsers and network protocols to be implemented in managed code inside of Silverlight, thus enabling support beyond the built-in native formats. Since MSS passes off the compressed media samples to the native decoders, it should offer nearly the same performance as a native code implementation (parsers aren't that expensive). But since it runs inside of the Silverlight managed code sandbox, support for new formats and protocols can be just added into player's .XAP package file, and will be completely transparent to the end user.”

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/First-MediaStreamSource-example-is-up/

The FLV specification has now been officially opened-up and published by Adobe.

http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/developers/

how to make MediaElement play again

brightstar — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 20:59:28 GMT

Hi everyone!

How I can make my MediaElement play again and again?

int i;

for(i=0; i<=10; i++) {

Media.Play();

}

Does anybody have the same desire top play his MediaElement again and again?

Error 4001 in added Silverlight video

mrtaikandi — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:01:57 GMT

Hi all,

I have a silverlight video included in an HTML page which was created by Expression Web 3.
Everything is fine as long as I open the file manually and play the video. But if an anchor on the page is targeted by a hyperlink somewhere else, clicking that hyperlink navigates the browser to that anchor and the page loads, but the video doesn't play.

After some research I realized Silverlight uses the address of the page to locate the video file, and since the address contains the anchor name as in "http://test.com/folder/page.htm#anchor", Silverlight is unable to find the video since it considers the #anchor section to be part of the address. Consequently, the following error message is shown in the Silverlight video player:

"Could not open media file 'http://test.com/mymedia.mp4#anchor' 4001 an error has occurred."

How do I fix this?

Interactive video

fra3910 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:51:28 GMT

Hi all

I'm trying to develop something like this www.caceresnews.com

Basically, the user can add his/her name in a Form and, after that, we have to "modify" the video adding his/her name in some parts of the video (for example, the street name, in a window, ...)

Can anybody help me? I don't know how to develop something like that

Thanks in advance

voice recognisetion in silverlight video

pardeepkaushik8 — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:41:58 GMT

hello i have a problem that i'm trying to add a vidoe in my page , and break it in multiple part and trying to handle it using voice recognisation

Example 1: i want to move to the last segment of the video

2: a screen pop up asking whether you want to carry further or not simply asking ""Yes or No"" and if i say yes through some sound media input device like headphone etc. If i say yes it move to next part or if i say no it move back

this is my problem can any one help , any idea how i move further on that project

any suggestion <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Looping playback in ExpressionMediaPlayer?

mpalmer.sps — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:59:31 GMT

I am trying to dynamically create a playlist and have that playlist looped forever.

Currently when the last item is reached the player simply stops...

In the Media Element there is a "MediaEnded" event that I can go into and control playback that way...

I cannot find a way of doing it with the MediaPlayer control

Here's the relevant code:

XAML:

xmlns:ExpressionMediaPlayer="clr-namespace:ExpressionMediaPlayer;assembly=MediaPlayer"
<ExpressionMediaPlayer:MediaPlayer x:Name="ctrlExpressionMedia1" Margin="8" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Style="{StaticResource StyleMediaPlayer1}" />

C#:

private void ctrlBtnPlaylist_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e){

ctrlExpressionMedia1.Playlist.Items.Clear();

ctrlExpressionMedia1.Playlist = _userPlaylist;

ctrlExpressionMedia1.Play();

}

Any Ideas?

Thanks!

Scrubber for Video playback

gwphillipson — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:01:21 GMT

Has anyone got any code in c# that will display a scrubber/progress bar when a video is playing, as i cannot find any examples for Silverlight 2 beta 1

Thanks in advance

George

My code is below

------------------------------------------------------

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Windows;

using System.Windows.Controls;

using System.Windows.Documents;

using System.Windows.Input;

using System.Windows.Media;

using System.Windows.Media.Animation;

using System.Windows.Shapes;

using System.Windows.Interop;

using System.Windows.Browser;

using System.Net;

using System.Windows.Resources;

using System.Windows.Media.Imaging;

using System.IO;

namespace Forum

{

public partial class Page : UserControl

{

public Page()

{

InitializeComponent();

FullScreenMode.MouseLeftButtonDown += new MouseButtonEventHandler(FullScreenMode_MouseLeftButtonDown);

App.Current.Host.Content.FullScreenChanged += new EventHandler(Content_FullScreenChanged);

PlayMedia.Source = new Uri("http://localhost:1969/Forum_Web/MemberMedia/WinVideo-YetAnotherCarousel.wmv", UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute);PlayMediaFS.Source = new Uri("http://localhost:1969/Forum_Web/MemberMedia/WinVideo-YetAnotherCarousel.wmv", UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute);

}

void FullScreenMode_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)

{

App.Current.Host.Content.IsFullScreen = App.Current.Host.Content.IsFullScreen ? false : true;

}

void Content_FullScreenChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

if (App.Current.Host.Content.IsFullScreen)

{

double targetWidth = (double)App.Current.Host.Content.ActualWidth;double targetHeight = (double)App.Current.Host.Content.ActualHeight;

Width = targetWidth;

Height = targetHeight;

PlayMediaFS.Width = targetWidth;

PlayMediaFS.Height = targetHeight;

PlayMediaFS.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;

PlayMedia.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed;

MediaCase.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed;

MediaBackground.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed;

//ButtonGroup.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed;

mediaStateTextBlock.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed;

}

else

{

PlayMediaFS.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed;

PlayMedia.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;

MediaCase.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;

MediaBackground.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;

//ButtonGroup.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;

mediaStateTextBlock.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;

}

//void DownloadImagePart(string imgPart)

//{

// WebClient wc = new WebClient();

// wc.OpenReadCompleted += new OpenReadCompletedEventHandler(wc_OpenReadCompleted);

// wc.DownloadProgressChanged += new DownloadProgressChangedEventHandler(wc_DownloadProgressChanged);

// wc.OpenReadAsync(new Uri("http://localhost:1969/Forum_Web/MemberMedia/WinVideo-YetAnotherCarousel.wmv", UriKind.Relative), imgPart);

//}

//void wc_DownloadProgressChanged(object sender, DownloadProgressChangedEventArgs e)

//{

// // Calculate the downloaded percentage.

// // Update the Rectangle and TextBlock objects of the visual progress indicator.

// progressText.Text = e.ProgressPercentage.ToString();

// progressRectangle.Width = (double)e.ProgressPercentage;

//}

public void Media_Play(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)

{

PlayMedia.Play();

}

public void Media_Stop(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)

{

PlayMedia.Stop();

}

public void Media_Pause(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)

{

PlayMedia.Pause();

}

public void Media_State_Changed(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

mediaStateTextBlock.Text = " Video: " + " " + PlayMedia.CurrentState.ToString();

}

---------------------------------------------------------

<UserControl x:Class="Forum.Page"

xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"

xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Width="324" Height="308"

x:Name="RealEstate">

<MediaElement x:Name="PlayMediaFS"

Width="298"

Height="223"

AutoPlay="True"

Stretch="Fill">

</MediaElement>

<Rectangle x:Name="MediaBackground"

Canvas.Left="0"

Canvas.Top="0"

Width="324"

Height="308"

Fill="#E6E6E6"

Stroke="#C0C0C0"

StrokeThickness="3"

RadiusX="5"

RadiusY="5">

</Rectangle>

<Canvas x:Name="MediaCase"

Canvas.Left="14"

Canvas.Top="11"

Width="298"

Background="Black"

Height="223">

<MediaElement x:Name="PlayMedia"

Width="298"

Height="223"

AutoPlay="False"

CurrentStateChanged="Media_State_Changed"

Stretch="Fill">

</MediaElement>

</Canvas>

<!--<StackPanel Height="48.439"

Width="300"

Canvas.Left="10"

Canvas.Top="240"

x:Name="ButtonGroup"

Orientation="Horizontal">

-->

<Button x:Name="mPlay"

MouseLeftButtonDown="Media_Play"

Canvas.Left="10"

Canvas.Top="240"

Width="50"

Height="30"

Content="Play"

Cursor="Hand"

ToolTip="Play"

FontSize="13"

<Button x:Name="mPause"

MouseLeftButtonDown="Media_Pause"

Canvas.Left="70"

Canvas.Top="240"

Width="50"

Height="30"

Content="Pause"

Cursor="Hand"

ToolTip="Pause"

FontSize="13"

<Button x:Name="mStop"

MouseLeftButtonDown="Media_Stop"

Canvas.Left="130"

Canvas.Top="240"

Width="50"

Height="30"

Content="Stop"

Cursor="Hand"

ToolTip="Stop"

FontSize="13"

<Button x:Name="FullScreenMode"

Canvas.Left="190"

Canvas.Top="240"

Width="80"

Height="30"

Content="Full Screen"

Cursor="Hand"

ToolTip="Full Screen"

FontSize="13"

<TextBlock x:Name="mediaStateTextBlock"

Canvas.Top="280"

Canvas.Left="10"

FontSize="12"/>

</Canvas>

</UserControl>

Live webcam streaming to a silverlight asp.net web application

simon scoffins — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:39:38 GMT

Dear Microsoft/silverlight community,

I require advice on what architecture and components I need to implement a relatively simple prototype application.

The functionality is to stream live images from a camera (usb webcam for starters) to a silverlight asp.net web application. As this is a prototype application, I simply want to build, host and demo the application on my laptop, probably viewing the hosted app from another laptop on the same network as well just for demo purposes.

I have, or can down load – via MSDN subscription, all the necessary tools such VS 2008, Expression studio etc.

I should my preference for the technology is Microsoft and Silverlight.

Having googled on how best to approach this I became very confused. There were many conflicting discussions on what silverlight could or could not do, Expression encoder 3 would not work but encoder 2 would, IIS streaming was the way to go….no, use media server etc, etc.

Anyway, I would be most appreciative of advice, feedback and direction.

Thanks,

Simon

Live streams from red5

bowljoman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:21:53 GMT

Hello, Dont know if any one is interested but I'll be releasing a plugin to allow developers to create multichannel data streams from within red5 over http tomcat servlets.

Here in my lab Im running mp3 live audio and will be implementing h264 video soon.

I'll probably post in here in the forum when there is some code to share.

Andy

http://www.thebitstream.com/

Increase buffer size for a 256k internet connection

ntoupal — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:56:11 GMT

I'm using Silverlight to watch movies on Netflix because I live in a very rural area I have limited bandwidth. I was wondering if there was any to increase the amount of movie that gets buffered before playback. Currently the player downloads about 5-10 minutes of playtime before playing (what means I have to watch movies in 10min chunks). With the old player that Netflixs used I could just let the whole movie play through and then restart the movie from the beginning and watch it straight through but Silverlight wants to resart buffering the movie all over again.

Thanks

Nate

I like one of the media in the encoder 3 I want to import it to blen3

banderastyle28 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:01:20 GMT

Hi everyone I like one of media player in encoder 3 templates so what I did is made a cop and rename xap file to zip now you find manifest.xamp mediaplayer.dll and other dll file how do I put it in my blend 3 thank you guys

Interactive CAD Application with Silverlight

sps4 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:17:12 GMT

Hello Silverlight-Experts,

we are developing an interactive web-based CAD application with Silverlight. The rendering is done on the server side and the result is then streamed to the Silverlight client as a H.264 encoded video stream. The Silverlight client just forwards mouse and keyboard events to the server and displays video stream.

We are currently facing two major problems with this approach. I would be grateful if you could share some ideas on how to solve them.

1. The server side should only render a new image if something has changed in the scene (e.g. camera position). However, in Silverlight we have to specify a priori how long each frame should be displayed. Therefor we have to permanently stream frames to the client. Thus, the stream eats up bandwith and encoding time on the server side even if the user is inactive.

2.We noticed, that the Silverlight display always lags some frames behind. Apparently, there is a buffer in the MediaElement that we can't eliminate (we have already set all buffers to zero). This is obviously a showstopper for an interactive application. Can you think of a solution?

Ideally, the client would display all H.264 encoded frames from the server instantanously and would display them as long as the next frame arrives. I know, that Silverlight hasn't been designed for this application, but is there a was to achieve this?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

Stefan

Play AAC data

giusethen — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:22:37 GMT

Hello i'm trying to play AAC data from my custom audio server. I have an audio server that sends over TCP AAC data and i'm trying to render audio with silverlight. AAC configuration is

Frequency = 48000, Channels=2, Profile=LC (those settings should be supported by SL3)

My problem is how to configure CodecPrivateData...I used class WaveFormatExtensible that provides a method "ToHexString":

protected MediaStreamDescription InitializeAudioDescription()
        {
            // Stream Description 
            Dictionary streamAttributes = new Dictionary();
           
            streamAttributes[MediaStreamAttributeKeys.CodecPrivateData] = new WaveFormatExtensible()
                                                                                            {
                                                                                                FormatTag = 0x00FF,
                                                                                                Channels = 2,
                                                                                                SamplesPerSec = 48000,
                                                                                                AverageBytesPerSecond = 48000 * 2 * 16 / 8,
                                                                                                BlockAlign = 8,
                                                                                                BitsPerSample = 16,
                                                                                                Size = 0
                                                                                            }.ToHexString();
            
            return new MediaStreamDescription(MediaStreamType.Audio, streamAttributes);
        }

The ToHexString produces: "FF00020080BB000000EE0200080010000000"

The issue is that the method GetSampleAsync is called only one time and then I suppose that i have a wrong configuration..

...
audioStream.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
MediaStreamSample sample = new MediaStreamSample(audioStreamDescription, audioStream, 0, 2048 * 2, currentAudioTimeTicks, emptySampleDictionary);
currentAudioTimeTicks += AudioFrameTimeTicks;//TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(40).Ticks;
//System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Log(0, "", "No Audio: " + (DateTime.Now.ToString("s") + "\n"));
ReportGetSampleCompleted(sample);
...

(the 2048*2 length is just for test...ignore it).

Any ideas???

Thanks a lot, Giuse

Is there a way to use silverlight-internal decoder to get RGBA data from VideoStream

xeoxx — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:40:53 GMT

Hi all, I want to decode the video-frames as soon as they are received. The frames do not come in with predictable accuracy. So I cannot give the exact presentation duration when using ReportGetSampleCompleted(sample) for the previous frame in my MediaStreamSource.GetSampleAsync(). Is there any access to the silverlight videoDecoder the mediaElement is using to decode the incoming frames to RGBA or YUV. Then I could write the picture into a buffer and present that till an other frame is coming in. Thanks!

How do I do live video streaming using Silverlight?

charlieclin1025 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:51:53 GMT

Hello, I'm currently an intern with Detroit Public TV who is interested in getting a live streaming service for a program I'm working on. The producer of the show doesn't want to use the standard PBS streaming option because it requires a twelve month subscription to it. We want to use a different site, and I thought of Silverlight because I knew that they provide video streaming for the University of Michigan athletic department and I was wondering if they could do the same for us if just this one time. How do my boss and I get in contact with somebody who knows how to do this?

Playing an mp4 from Expression Encoder

djclinton — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:22:20 GMT

Greetings,

I'm trying to get an mp4 to play in the MediaElement but there doesn't seem to be any CLEAR examples of how to do this.

XAML

The mp4 works when it's outputted by the Expression Encoder with a Template.

All help would help.

Thanks

support for 3d services in silverlight

giddy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:54:58 GMT

hi, I'm making the big move from .net 2.0 to the 3.x+ world. Just learnt LINQ so far, I plan to learn WPF from Applications = Markup + Code by petzold. I also am interested in getting petzolds book on 3D development in WPF. What kind of support does silverlight have for 3D content. Does it support all classes under System.Windows.Media.Media3D? Sorry its a little off topic but would anyone recommend a book to quickly understand silverlight. I'm an MCTS windows developer and I know ASP.NET 2.0 decently well. I've also been looking at Asp.net AJAX. So I need a quick crash course from a programmer perspective. Thanks so much Gideon

Expression Media Player

silverlightmonster — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:31:06 GMT

Hi,

Is it possible to use Expression Media Player to play videos from youtube, vimeo, or any other video sharing site? How can this be done? Is it possible to just give the url in the source?

e.g: source=http://www.youtube.com?watch....

MediaStreamAttributeKeys and custom parser.

bowljoman — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:46:02 GMT

Hello, Imwritting a couple mediastreamsource parsers and the documentation is a little vague about CodecPrivateData and in particular Im looking for how I can expose framerate.

If I need a full bit map info header or such.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.mediastreamattributekeys(VS.95).aspx

I published my job in my silverlight account but it is not working

banderastyle28 — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 06:02:49 GMT

Hello anyone can help me please I created a job and then I published it in my silverlight account however everything seem good when

when I try demo it is not working. Anyone can help me please

Playing MIDI through Silverlight

generalgoodtimes — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 04:06:45 GMT

More specifically, would it be possible to create a MIDI file in memory and then load it into some media playing object that silverlight might have? I'm not looking to communicate with MIDI devices, just play MIDI files...

MediaStreamSource and WMV

moorglade — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:43:07 GMT

I'm trying to play a WMV stream from raw samples by using MediaStreamSource, but I can't figure out what kind of data I should use to set the MediaStreamAttributeKeys.CodecPrivateData.

MSDN on CodecPrivateData:

Codec data that the pipeline needs to initialize and render correctly. For video, this is other header information. For audio, this is the base16-encoded WaveFormatEx structure.

Well, I know what "the base16-encoded WaveFormatEx structure" is, but "other header information" seems a little vague.

If I set the FourCC attribute to "WMV3" (which is supported by Silverlight) and do not provide anything for CodecPrivateData, the format is not being accepted by Silverlight.

My guess would be that maybe I'm supposed to use the VideoInfoHeader structure (which is somewhat similar to WaveFormatEx), but I cannot find any evidence to support this idea. I also know that there is something (a small byte array in fact) called "Private Data" which is appended to the VideoInfoHeader (and also to WaveFormatEx).

I would really appreciate it if anyone could shed light on the issue.