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.
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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/
I developed a socket based p2p system where i stream mp4 video from a client to a server. The video data are transferred using byte[].
The transfer works, however i am struggling to figure out how i could play, in continuous, a mp4 file being transferred to another PC? The PC application, that would play the file, is in WPF.
I tried using a MediaElement to play the file, being written to the disk, but for some reason it doesnt play at all. I can play it with VideoLan tho.
Any hint of where to look? I am lost from here!
Thanks in advance!
Its going to be different with every player. Mp4 is probably the worst possible container for this application. The container is designed to be used with random access media, such has a hard disk. The player has the ability, and sometimes requirement to seek around within the file, and not just plat start to finish. Either you need to make the protocol mp4 aware (parse the file, and download the block that will most like be needed next), or use a streamable container such as TS, or flv.
Its is also possible that the player knows the file is incomplete. The atoms sizes are encoded within the file. If the file size doest match, the combined atom sizes, the player could assume a corrupt file.If this is what is happening, you can try to pre allocate the file. it may trick the player enough to play
I´m doing a "Whatsapp" like app and I need to send user videos (from camera/gallery).
I need to send video from ios to android and from android to ios (windows phone in the future).
First thing I thought is to use camera params to record the video in low resolution, but that won´t help with recorded videos stored in the phone already.
Second thought was to zip the video file, but I guess this is not enough for very large files.
Third: actually compressing the video file generating a new file, and then zip it before sending it through the network.
So this is what I need before actually sending the video:
Compress the video file, generating a new file that will play nicely in
both platforms (ios and android)
Make the compressing process aysnc(as I don´t want to block the UI
thread for a really long time)
Zip it (this is the easy part, just for the record)
Any ideas or help are appreciated
You would best need to use your platforms framework to also leverage existing hardware support for encoding (mainly h.264 hardware encoding). A PCL solution would eat to much battery as it would need to run on CPU only giving you bad performance and even worst battery live.
This ties in with 1. Just use your platforms native method to execute the frameworks methods async.
Skip this part. It will increase overhead and disallow video streaming There are virtually 0 benefits from using a zip algorithm on top of an already compressed video stream.
Just make sure that you end up with a cross platform compatible video format like H264.
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'm working on an ASP.NET app that allows users to upload video files. After the user uploads, I need to determine some of the attributes of the media - namely it's duration/length, resolution, and codec (if possible).
What's the simplest way to approach this? Should I use the WMP SDK - this seems to involve actually instantiating the media player on the server. Is there anything in the framework to do this, or do I need to rely on an external library?
I'm not concerned about displaying or streaming the video back to the user.
There is nothing in the framework, you will need some sort of library. The best I've seen (but it has been a year or so since I've looked) is taglib-sharp:
http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/TagLib_Sharp
The site seems to be down right now, but I see that it's been ported to fink (for OSX) only a couple of months ago, so I assume that is temporary.
oops, just saw that you're not the first to ask a question along these lines and I'm not the first to suggest taglib-sharp:
View/edit ID3 data for MP3 files
(note: it supports audio and video files).
hth