Thread: streaming live video from webcam

I never did it, but to stream video you need DirectShow. Microsoft, to my knowledge, hasn't still provided language bindings for C# or a .Net port/translation of this library. Fortunately you have DirectShow.Net.

I've used LEADTOOLS Multimedia Developer Toolkit for a project before. It's not free, but it was really slick and easy to use.

You need to look at the documentation for the development side of the Windows Media Player. If you are going to use DirectShow you will need to look at the documentation for the DirectX Video Mixing Renderer or the VMR. You may have to use P/invoke's and or C++/CLI code to talk to C/C++ code that does the heavy lifting. I am not aware of anything in .NET as of yet that encapsulates this functionality. There is code on the internet for this very thing and once you get the VMR up and running it should be a few lines of code to get the right video input pin and video source for the player.

Originally Posted by Elkvis

DirectShow has been mentioned in a lot of the web pages I've seen about this, but I haven't been able to find any good tutorials on how to do the things I'm trying to do. EVERYTHING assumes you want to save the video to a file, and I've been having a hard time finding code that shows how to just get the raw output from the codec so I can use a UDP socket instead.

I've shown you a library that has all you need to interface with DirectShow. That library comes with documentation, so that's a start.

Originally Posted by Elkvis

I was pointing out that if silverlight was suitable for my needs I would be using it, but since it is very restrictive (for "security" reasons)

It is safe to hold your breath on that. If you aren't in a hurry and don't mind waiting for Silverlight 5 beta sometime soon this year, you will no longer be required to run in a sandbox: The Future of Microsoft Silverlight | Microsoft Silverlight

From access to p/Invoke, to COM interoperability, to documents folder access, the only thing distinguishing a silverlight application from a windows .net application will be what device you are using to access it.

Sidenote: If you have any complaints about the fact they are basically removing all security features that made silverlight safe, you will waste your breath, like I did. It seems the idea many developers have of security goes more or less like this:

- Programmer A: Silverlight is great! It is very secure. You run it basically in a sandbox.
- Programmer B: Yeah. But I need to access an external API and I can't.
- Programmer A: Yeah, that part sucks. Too much security. Can't do anything.
- Programmer A: Wait...

on the subject of DirectShowNet, I have it working, but the documentation is basically nonexistent, except for the official MSDN documentation of the API, which of course is in C++, but hopefully it translates well enough for me to understand what's going on. I've never worked with directx before, and I really don't even know where to start, but I guess I'll just have to figure it out.

This is what I have found as well. Good documentation for both the managed and unmanaged sides of this beast are simply not out there. Fortunately there are some books on Amazon that actually do talk about how to go about correctly using DirectShow in applications and in games (with a full screen or windowed device and with multiple movies playing).

The video mixing renderer for DirectX9 is nice but is sorely lacking in documentation and it is not apparent from Microsoft code samples (which are very trivial implementations of the feature) exactly how to perform certain operations on the movies or how to communicate with the VMR and/or control it. Googling is equally as worthless since most of the samples are derivatives of the samples in the Windows SDK and several people recommend not using the VMR9. It is possible to put live webcam feeds onto DCs (IE: textures) and then to output or blit the DC to another DC for display. I cannot go into more detail about this but I can tell you it most certainly works. So if you can use the managed side of the VMR it may save you some work with the downside that you may need an XNA device.