I'm looking at trying to create a simple 'slider puzzle' game. You've seen the ones, you have an image and you shuffle the tiles.
However, I want to make one that will play back videos instead. What I'm trying to determine is whether it's possible to playback a video in C# and render the video on different controls (probably buttons, or panels). I've spotted the Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback classes but haven't found much documentation on them yet.
So to throw it up in the air, is this going to be possible to do without too much difficulty? Are there any useful (free) libraries that might help me along?
Have a look at DirectShowNet that wraps the DirectShow API, in the samples page there is a sample called PlayWnd the shows how to play a video file.
Depending upon how large and how long your video sources are, you could accomplish this very simply by first converting your videos to animated GIFs. A .Net PictureBox control will display and animate a GIF automatically, and you could easily use PictureBoxes for your tiles.
One big advantage of this approach is that (thanks to Mono) your application could work unaltered on Windows, Mac and the iPhone (also Linux and a couple others).
Related
I am developing an UWP Desktop Application, where I would like to capture a video with my WebCam and apply some Video Effects on it.
I am using MediaComposition, MediaClip, MediaOverlay to composite multiple videos and intro pngs as a composition and put some overlays on it.
Now I was trying to implement a slow motion and reverse (boomerang /pingpong) video effect on my composition. I was expecting, that there are already some available IBasicVideoEffect effects for that, but I am searching since 3 days and not able to find something similar.
There is also FFmpegInteropX, which is I was trying but still not able to achieve my goal. But I also would like to avoid using FFMPEG in my project.
Does someone have any Ideas how to implement a slow motion and reverse video effect with UWP?
Thank you in advance.
I need a very simple video player in my C# app. It only has to loop a video from file and nothing more. Since I'm developing a WPF application, I've tried to use System.Windows.Controls.MediaElement. It has all the functions I need, but works quite poor: I've played some full HD videos on it, and it's always lagging and spiking.
To make sure, it's not my app problem, I've created 2 test applications. The first in a WinForms borderless 1920x1080 window with only AxWMPLib.AxWindowsMediaPlayer control. And the second in a borderless WPF window of the same size with System.Windows.Controls.MediaElement.
Then I run 2 videos on both of players. Here are their specs:
1: 1920x1080, 12000kb/s, 25 FPS, wmv
2: 1920x1080, 5730kb/s, 25 FPS, mp4
On AxWindowsMediaPlayer everything looks fine. But MediaElement seems to drop some frames and ignore vertical sync (it's possible to see parts of one frame on another during fast scene changes). So, it's completely unsuitable and shouldn't be like that, but I've found nothing about the problem in Microsoft official docs (they only suggest to use MediaElement instead of AxWindowsMediaPlayer in WPF apps). Is it possible to make it work more smoothly or using an additional WinForms Form with AxWindowsMediaPlayer is the only solution?
It was written over five years ago (look up James Dailey messages in the thread), there were possibly some improvements but overall I suppose the statements are still in good standing. I will pick up some relevant quotes:
As you know the WPF environment is constructed from the ground up to offer developers a very rich “graphics first” environment. The MediaElement in particular was designed to allow you to mix video with various other UI components seamlessly. This solution will give you the flicker free, “draw over video” solution that you are looking for. The best part is you can do all of this in C#. The bad part of this solution is that the MediaElement is not designed for displaying time sensitive media content. In other words, the MediaElement is notorious for dropping and delaying the display of video frames. There are ways to minimize this such as using SD rather than HD content, use a video accelerated codec, etc.
also:
Unfortunately you can’t really tell the WPF MediaElement to never drop frames. The term we use for this class of issues is “disparate clocks”. In this case WPF is updating the screen at a certain rate (clock 1). The MediaElement (based on WMP) is cranking out video frames at a slightly different rate (clock 2). Given the underlying technologies there is currently no way to synchronize the two clocks and force them to “tick” at the same rate. Since the display will only be updated according to the WPF clock, multiple frames of video may be sent from the MediaElement to WPF between clock ticks. Because of this the MediaElement may appear to drop frames. This is a very common problem in multimedia development and there is no simple solution.
Windows Media Player uses Media Foundation and DirectShow APIs which power media playback with high quality video experience.
We have a c# application that performs processing on video streams. This is a low-level application that receives each frame in Bitmap format, so basically we need 25 images each second. This application is already working for some of our media sources, but we now need to add a webcam as an input device.
So we basically need to capture bitmap images from a webcam continuously so that we can pass all these frames as a "stream" to our application.
What is the best and simplest way to access the webcam and read the actual frames directly from the webcam as individual images? I am still in the starting blocks.
There are a multitude of libraries out there that allows one to access the webcam, preview the content of the webcam on a windows panel and then use screen capturing to capture this image again. This, unfortunately, will not give us the necessary performance when capturing 25 frames per second. IVMRWindowlessControl9::GetCurrentImage has been mentioned as another alternative, but this again seems to be aimed at an infrequent snapshot rather than a constant stream of images. Directshow.Net is mentioned by many as a good candidate, but it is unclear how to simply grab the images from the webcam. Also, many sources state a concern about Microsoft no longer supporting Directshow. Also, implementations I've seen of this requires ImageGrabber which is apparently also no longer supported. The newer alternative from MS seems to be Media Foundation, but my research hasn't turned up any working examples of how this can be implemented (and I'm not sure if this will run on older versions of windows such as XP). DirectX.Capture is an awesome library (see a nice implementation) but seems to lack the filters and methods to get the video images directly. I have also started looking at Filters and Filter Graphs but this seems awfully complex and does feel a bit like "reinventing the wheel".
Overall, all the solutions briefly mentioned above seem to rather old. Can someone please point me in the direction of a step-by-step guide for getting a webcam working in C# and grabbing several images per second from it? (We will also have to do audio at some point, so a solution that does not exclude video would be most helpful).
I use AForge.Video (find it here: code.google.com/p/aforge/) because it's a very fast c# implementation. i am very pleased with the performance and it effortlessly captures from two HD webcams at 30fps on an 8 year old PC. the data is supplied as a native IntPtr so it's ideal for further processing using native code or opencv.
opencv wrappers emgu and opencvsharp both implement a rudimentary video capture functionality which might be sufficient for your purposes. clearly if you are going perform image processing / computer vision you might want to use those anyway.
As dr.mo suggests, Aforge was the answer.
I used the tutorial from here: http://en.code-bude.net/2013/01/02/how-to-easily-record-from-a-webcam-in-c/
In the tutorial, they have an event handler fire each time a frame is received from the webcam. In the original tutorial, this bitmap is used to write the image to a PictureBox. I have simply modified it to save the bitmap image to a file rather than to a picturebox. So I have replaced the following code:
pictureBoxVideo.BackgroundImage = (Bitmap)eventArgs.Frame.Clone();
with the following code:
Bitmap myImage = (Bitmap)eventArgs.Frame.Clone();
string strGrabFileName = String.Format("C:\\My_folder\\Snapshot_{0:yyyyMMdd_hhmmss.fff}.bmp", DateTime.Now);
myImage.Save(strGrabFileName, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Bmp);
and it works like a charm!
I am starting a new project to show live video in a Windows form from an attached web cam and overlay that video with windows controls (buttons etc). Additionally I would like to do some image correction to remove distortion on the fly and do some edge detection.
I'm confused as to which library might be best suited for this.
OpenCVSharp - Can handle the correction / detection, not sure if overlay / live feed is possible.
DirectShow/DirectShow.Net - Do I need to code filters up for the
overlay, how to handle edge detection?
AForge.net - It's been recommended but I'm not sure it is as capable
Does anyone have experience of these or other libs that might be suitable for access from .Net?
If you only want to work with the vision part then AForge.net is your best bet. I have used it in the past and it was pretty good for video/feed stuff. Don't expect to do something with your audio later on though since AForge.NET only supports Vision related stuff. Personally I wouldn't use DirectShow since that is pretty old and sometimes requires you to do some complex interop tricks to get what you want. If you want to go the DirectShow way at least use DirectShow.NET.
I believe you can accomplish that with OpenCVSharp and the instructions from transparent image overlay.
I am working on the development of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) in .NET using C# and Silverlight. One of the features that has been requested for this game is to allow players to upload their own avatars.
Rather than displaying the uploaded images in their raw forms, we want to convert the images to a cartoon form--in other words to cartoonize the image.
Several sites which can accomplish such a task are listed at http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/11-sites-to-create-cartoon-characters-of-yourself/
I realize that these sites are applying an image filter to create the cartoon image. Frankly, I have no reasonable idea what these cartoon image filter algorithms might look like or if there is anything already available in C# or .NET that I could use. If there are no libraries available, I am curious how difficult it would be to roll my own.
This is a minor game feature so I am not interested in devoting a week or more of coding time to implement this. However, if I can code up what I need within a day, then it is probably viable.
At this point, I am primarily looking for guidance as to
what is possible
what libraries are already available (preferably as open source)
where i may find additional information
any other advice or guidance you may be able to provide
Thank you in advance!
Apparently you apply a Gaussian Blur filter to the image. Then you sharpen the image. Perhaps the AForge libraries would help you out.
I've used code from the image processing lab on code project before with success. (update: here's the library it uses)
Christian Graus also has written a whole series on GDI image processing which I found useful (and has the effects listed above for filtering capabilities).