Programming with .NET - General

How to capture a thumbnail image of a video?

Hi,

How to capture a thumbnail image of a video in SilverLight 2 ?

Thanks

Re: How to capture a thumbnail image of a video?

Hello, you can't do that in Silverlight. You'll have to do that on the server. The simplest way to capture capture a screen shoot is using WPF's RenderTargetBitmap. You will of course need .NET 3.0 or above on the server. Then in your web service application, you can use Process.Start method to start a WPF application. In the WPF application, you can write something like this:

private MediaPlayer player = new MediaPlayer();

private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

VideoDrawing vd = new VideoDrawing();

player.Open(new Uri("expressionstudio.wmv", UriKind.Relative));

vd.Rect = new Rect(0, 0, 300, 300);

vd.Player = player;

player.MediaOpened += new EventHandler(player_MediaOpened);

player.Play();

//You may want to pass a parameter to the WPF application to indicate which frame you want to capture.

player.Position = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30);

}

void player_MediaOpened(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

DrawingVisual drawingVisual = new DrawingVisual();

DrawingContext drawingContext = drawingVisual.RenderOpen();

drawingContext.DrawVideo(player, new Rect(new Point(0, 0), new Point(300, 300)));

drawingContext.Close();

RenderTargetBitmap rtb = new RenderTargetBitmap(300, 300, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Pbgra32);

rtb.Render(drawingVisual);

//Do whatever you want with this bitmap and then shutdown the WPF application.

player.Stop();

App.Current.Shutdown();

}

You can also try to use the WPF APIs directly in the web service application. But I haven't tested that.

Re: How to capture a thumbnail image of a video?

Is there any way to elaborate on this anymore or does anyone els ehave an incite?

Re: Re: How to capture a thumbnail image of a video?

Yi-Lun Luo --

Thanks very much. I'm using a web hosting service (DiscountASP.NET). Do you think this would work there?

Thanks for your help.

Re: How to capture a thumbnail image of a video?

It's easy, just use some screen recorder can help you capture pictures from video. It can record whatever on your screen as video file, you just need to play the video on your computer screen, and it will help you record image of the video. And it also can help you save the image to standard format file.