I need to broadcast audio content to the network, receive it and play in the browser “on the fly”. The audio content is just list of mp3 files. and on client side it should looks like endless audio stream without state. Something like YouTube live streams. Or smth like online radio.
But I really don’t know anything about that. Can anyone helps me with that? How it works, which protocol is used for sending and receiving data? Anything that can help me with that.
At the best I’m looking for a solution for .NET, but I will be glad for anything that can help, at least to understand how it works in general.
Thank you.
One way to do it would be with help of ffmpeg.
You can use ffmpeg to create DASH or HLS playlist https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#hls-2
FFMPEG supports other streaming solutions too.
To invoke ffmpeg you have to find binaries that are compatible with your system that your server is running on (windows, linux). Here is how can you start external process from C#: How do I start a process from C#?
To play your playlist in browser you can use VideoJS. It has built-in support for DASH and HLS: https://videojs.com/ (it can play audio too)
Build your logic to manage / update playlists and then you just need to create HTTP service that can serve your playlist file. VideoJS will play it for you.
If you go with HLS then you probably should read this: https://developer.apple.com/streaming/
If you go with DASH then read this:
https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/mpeg-dash
Another way is to use out of the box solutions which often aren't free:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/
https://www.wowza.com/
Related
I’m developing an UWP app that should be able to play videos transferred through a custom TCP protocol implementation.
Videos are MP4, so there’s no need to decode frames.
My current solution is to download the file first, and then allow the user to play it, but with big files this is quite annoying.
As a workaround I tried to implement IRandomAccessStream to feed the MediaPlayer while the file gets downloaded, but this isn’t a good solution for sure as there’s no buffering (and the video is just laggy on bad networks) nor visual download progress in the TransportControls.
I know it is possible to create a custom MediaStreamSource, but it requires known encoding properties to be created and anyway it sounds like an overkill to have to decode frames by myself to feed it.
So I’m wondering if there’s any solution to my problem.
I am trying to create a radio app, which contains a collection of MP3-stream urls. However, I have run into some trouble streaming (or playing back) the audio.
I am trying to connect to a raw data stream like the ones you plug into VLC. An example url is http://mp3.ht-stream.net/;80 (just plugged this one and a few others into VLC and it worked perfectly). Basically your standard internet radio feed.
I have created the AudioPlaybackAgent, filled in what I think is needed to get this up and running, and everything works fine when I stream regular .mp3 files over the internet. But when I try to connect to these streams, it doesn't do (or play) anything.
I reckon it could be because I'm not using an AudioStreamingAgent (with a MediaStreamSource implementation), but that stuff is a bit too advanced for me, and as I understood after some hours searching the interwebs, mp3 streams could use the AudioPlaybackAgent instead.
Any advice on how I can make this work? Will I have to use an AudioStreamingAgent instead? Is there any open source examples as to how I implement this mysterious MediaStreamSource class? Should I scrap my great idea? Any answers will be greatly appreciated.
My AudioPlayer.cs code is available here if you'd like a peek - but it's mostly the standard stuff.
You can't easily play audio from the provided link because of this is not a regular audio file. This is SHOUTcast stream.
You can check some open source implementations and to figure out how to work with this audio stream. For example: Shoutcast MediaStreamSource.
So I can say that you need to implement a lot of stuff in your app to play this stream. There is no quick and easy way.
Look at the Background Audio Streamer sample.
I want to make a program which takes video and audio and merges them. Video type or audio type is not important for me. How can I make this? Does any library exist for this? I know there are many programs about this topic but I want to learn how to implement such a program.
The technical term for what you are trying to do is 'multiplexing', and commonly referred to as 'muxing'.
FFmpeg is a multiplatform command line tool that does this, and arguable the industry standard. Many projects wrap FFmpeg into libraries and GUIs.
FFmpeg is also open source, so you can download the code and see how they have done it. That siad, it is very big and complex.
If you are interested in the actual mechanics of muxing separate audio and video files together into a destination file, then you will need to learn much about container formats and Codecs.
Look at some sort of FFMPEG wrapper in C#.
An easy way to multiplex audio and video on linux is to use gstreamer. Here's a A/V pipeline that you can create using gst-launch on a shell prompt.
filesrc location=file1.vid ! queue ! mux. filesrc location=file2.aud ! queue ! mux. avimux name=mux ! filesink location=output.avi
Replace file1.vid with the name of your encoded video file and file2.aud with the name of your encoded audio file. output.avi is the container file that you need.
I would like to emulate video input from a webcam for testing purposes.
So I need to be able to emulate a software video capture device in Windows and be able to dynamically generate its output.
How can I achieve this?
I would prefer a solution in C# or C++.
You can use a Virtual Webcam (old link, but there are others) it will take a video/images file and will display it in a webcam device. Your system will think that its a normal device.
Then you will need to create something that will generate the video/images, if you need static image then its pretty easy to generate a bmp.
Old (no selected answer) question.... actually probably one of the oldest I've ever seen... but I came across this looking for an answer myself, I remembered the day when "Virtual Webcam" still existed (now just a chinese ad site).
Fear not! There are new sources to solve your decade long quest:
First of all, checkout OBS, open source does a LOT with video streams:
https://obsproject.com/
Second, checkout this virtual webcam plugin for it. Does exactly what you're talking about, and does use #qbeuek's suggestion of DirectDraw:
https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/
It is written in C++, so grabbing the bits you need and rewriting to C# is left as an exercise to the reader, but the capability is there.
As far as I know, there is a set of COM interfaces that govern the recording and playback of audio and video in Windows. It used to be called DirectShow, but maybe in the meantime the name has been changed. Those interfaces are used to construct a graph of audio and video filters, to encode / decode the data stream.
The way to go:
- read about the Microsoft DirectShow API,
- implement a COM object that implements the video source interface,
I have a requirement to build a very simple streaming server. It needs to be able to capture video from a device and then stream that video via multicast to several clients on a LAN.
The capture part of this is pretty easy (in C#) thanks to a library someone wrote with DirectShow.Net (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/directx/directxcapture.aspx).
The question I have now is how to multicast this? This is the part I'm stuck on. I'm not sure what to do next, or what steps to take.
There are no filters available that you can plug and use.
You need to do three things here:
Compress the video into MPEG2 or MPEG4
Mux it into MPEG Transport Stream
Broadcast it
There are lots of codecs available for part 1, and some devices can even output compressed video.
The part 3 is quite simple too.
Main problem goes with part 2, as MPEG Transport Stream is patented. It is licensed so that you cannot develop free software based on it (VLC and FFMPEG violate that license), and you have to pay several hundred dollars just to obtain a copy of specification.
If you have to develop it, you need to:
Obtain a copy of ISO/IEC 13818-1-2000 (you may download it as PDF from their site), it describes MPEG Transport Stream
Develop a renderer filter that takes MPEG Elementary Streams and muxes them into Transport Stream
It has to be a renderer as Transport Stream is not a transform filter. There are some kind of outband data (program allocation tables and reference clocks) that need to be sent on a regular basis, and you need to keep a worker thread to do that.
To achieve that you need to setup/write some kind of video streaming server.
I've used VideoCapX for the same purpose on my project. The documentation and support is not top notch, but it's good enough. It's using WMV streaming technology. The stream is called MMS stream. You can view it with any most media player. I've tested with Windows Media Player, Media Player Classics and VLC. If you would like to see it's capability without writing any code just yet, take a look at U-Broadcast, it uses VideoCapX to do the job behind the scene.
I've been using DirectShow.Net for almost 2 years, and I still find it hard to write a streaming server myself, due to the complexity of DirectShow technology.
Other than WMV, you can take a look at Helix Server or Apple Streaming Server. The latter one is not free, so is WMV Streaming Server from Microsoft.
You can also take a look at VLC or Windows Media Encoder to do streaming straight from the application. But so far I find U-Broadcast out do both of the above. VLC has some compatibility issue with codec and playback from non VLC player, WME has problem with starting up capturing device.
Good Luck
NOTE: I'm not associated with VideoCapX or it's company, I'm just a happy user of it.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/directx/DShowStreamingServer.aspx might help, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player#cite_note-14
VLC also "should" be able to stream from any device natively.