I'm working on a home project that involves comparing images to a database of images (using a quadrant - or so - histogram approach). I wanted to know what my options are in regards to web cams or other image capture devices that:
Are easy to work with with the
Windows SDK (particularly
DirectShow, which I plan to use
with C#)
Have drivers for both
64-bit and 32-bit Windows Vista (and
Server 2008)
I'm asking primarily so I can avoid pitfalls that other people may have experienced with web cams and to see if there are other image capture devices (or C# usable APIs) available that I should look at. I suspect that any old web cam will do but I'd rather be safe than sorry.
If you only want images, many web cams support TWAIN -- you can use with .NET using this code
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/twaindotnet.aspx
I'm doing something very similar with webcams and have found that logitech and Microsoft branded webcams work just fine with DirectShow.
I've also found that many NEW webcams don't support twain, and WIA support for doing live captures has been removed in Vista, and doesn't exist in 2000, so Directshow has been the only thing that seems to work reliably accross OS's.
Related
I am trying to develop a Windows Form Application (not WPF) where I would require to preview numbers of cameras available on a tablet or PC, take pictures and then save the pictures in the device.
I am very new to this kind of application development and recently came accross Media Capture but I can not find a good lead to start with.
Can anyone let me know how to approach or how can I build the application with the aforementioned features or provide a good lead??
P.S. Found a good example on https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/media-capture-sample-adf87622/ but it uses XML not the Win Form Application type.....
What kind of cameras do you have? If the cameras support onvif, then there is a good onvif camera software you could try. You can handle many cameras with it, you can take snapshots so I guess it could work for you.
Having searched high and low for native c# hook to webcam, I found 5 basic ways to interact with the camera.
Video for Windows (VFW)
DirectX
avicap32.dll
WIA
3rd party tools
My requirement is to take a photo. The application will be used on some legacy windows XP and Vista machines, but going forward Windows 7 and greater will be required. So what might the best approach be with the broad install base? Just reading WIA looked like the way to go but looks like some changes were made so it works a little different now (I don't know for sure). I understand that some people have done combos.
Might need to crop photo, but that is really about it.
For school visitor monitoring.
I think the best thing is to use the WIA. I know a third party toolkit that could help you doing your requirements which is leadtools. You can check this Tutorial
I would always try to pick up something already on the web and tweak it to my own needs... some open source project or an example where the mainly portion of my app is already made.
on Codeplex you can find a nice library to work with webcams and it's simply called
WebCam Library for WinForm and WPF with C# and VB.NET
Give that a try, maybe you can even help the project, by contributing your own findings, and everyone is a winner... isn't Open Source a great idea?!
I need to develop a C# touch-screen desktop application with a "modern good-looking" UI.
How would you approach it? I´ve got in mind using Flash (just for the UI) or WPF... but i´m open to any idea or any third-party C# UI you´d know.
Is Flash easy to integrate with C#?
Thanks for your knowledge!
You should look for a AMF remoting library in C#.
Remoting is when you call a function on your server from flash.
AMF (version 0 or 3) is a binary format used to encode object transfered
between client and server
Weborb and fluorine are solutions for this.
see : .NET and AMF
You will probably be doing well with a third party framework to avoid the overhead of writing user interactions, controls, etc.
A couple of options are
http://xamarin.com/
http://www.resco.net/developer/mobileformstoolkit/
A review of these options is provided here.
I recall combining a flash interface with a C# back-end back in university. There's a method called fscommand() that will take a couple of string parameters (I may be mistaken, read up on it) to pass to and from the interface and the C# "code-behind".Flash is an ok option, but if I were you I'd opt for a WPF interface. I'm a huge fan of the telerik libraries, their WPF one allows you to create the most modern-looking interfaces and dashboards. Not to mention that the skills you will acquire while learning enough about wpf will be hugely beneficial in your career as a developer the way things are going (depending, obviously, on what direction you're heading).
FlashBuilder 4.6 has some nice functionality for quickly building a UI that work on a desktop or mobile device. You could use FluorineFX (free) or webOrb on a webserver to send data back and forth to a database server if that were needed. If you build it with the Flashbuilder 4.6 mobile project template, it would work on a iPad, mac, windows pc, or android device as well. Since a pc touchscreen should use the same type of finger gestures as a mobile app, this might be a nice way to go. (I don't actually have a touchscreen on my pc, but it runs well with a mouse, so I'd assume it worked with gestures too).
Adobe.tv has lots of examples of building a mobile app project (Which also runs on a PC) and there is a Flashbuilder 4.6 free trial.
http://flex.org/
We want to write a client for an online service which should be available on as many platforms as possible. This question is about what programming language and framework we should use to create this client.
These platforms are required: Linux, Mac, Windows, iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad) and Android. The more the better.
For the mobile platforms there is Titanium Mobile. I haven't tried this thing yet, the website says you can develop for both iOS and Android using web skills such as Javascript. I don't know yet if you can deploy for both platforms using the SAME code. It would be great!
There is also Titanium Desktop but I don't like the idea that the complete source code is shared with the final application. Titanium does this for Mobile too but it isn't that easy to modify an app loaded via App Store.
So, what other way is there to create an application which runs on at least the three major desktop platforms? I thought c# with mono would be the way to go but I just realized that you need to use mono with MonoMac in order to publish it on the Mac App Store and use things like Growl. And since MonoMac is naturally only available for Macs, it's again not possible to deploy the mono app on all platforms without rewriting it for at least the Mac. And it would be nice if the app looks "native" on all platforms. Gtk# just does not look good on a Mac. It's "okay" on Windows and great on Linux.
I know we could use Objective-C for iOS and Mac, Java for Android, C#.net for Windows and C#.mono for Linux but the main point is that we don't want to write the same app in a lot of different languages. That would make development and maintenance really hard.
And we prefer languages with C-style syntax which are much easier to learn for us PHP web developers. Btw: We dislike Air and I'm not sure about Java since I never used it but it also does not look "native" and it feels kinda slow.
Edit:
Just a note: It wouldn't be a problem to create an own form for each platform if at least the remaining code is the same. Is it possible to use MonoMac, Gtk# and Win Forums in the same C# application? And I'd prefer C# over C++ as I have no skills in C++, so I first need to check how hard it is to write with Qt.
Another note: We don't plan to spend much money and because we need to pay Apples Developer Programs we want to use free or cheap technology. Preferable Open Source.
Just use C# for all of the above.
The mono project will cover Mac and Linux, with monodroid your android requirements are covered and monotouch will take care of iPod/iPad/iPhone.
In regards to UI - mono has full support for the System.Windows.Forms namespace, so you don't have to use GTK# if you don't want to.
I don't think I need to mention windows support ;)
If you really want to support all those platforms from a single application, your best bet will be to create a web application. With HTML5, such an application can even be cached on the device and used when no connection is available. Also, that strategy would make it feasible to customize the UI based on the device running the app.
You will not have good luck if you set out to build a single native app that runs on Android and iOS, let alone all the other platforms you mentioned. The reason that they're different platforms rather than the same is that they're, well, different. They have different capabilities, run on different hardware, are built with different languages, employ different application models with different user interfaces, and have audiences with different expectations.
The best solution I've come across over the years is Qt SDK.
Great support for all major platforms, Symbian, OS X, Linux flavors, Windows, Windows CE (mobile), Android and iOS partial support and etc.
Its base is C++ but bindings for almost every language (like C#) is available. Lots of help and support is also covered.
The core Qt libs are very fast and extensive, And the whole KDE desktop (of Linux) is done with it. Famous software like VLC and VirtualBox are done in Qt.
Another relatively new way of doing cross-platform development is to use the open source Eto.Forms, which allows you to have one UI codebase target each platform's native toolkit. It is a UI abstraction layer that can target GTK#, MonoMac/OSX, WinForms, and WPF.
There is also an iOS port in the works.
Java sounds like the best fit. It is cross-platform, easy to understand, has a huge userbase and android is based on it.
Depending if you need an offline interaction mode, it sounds like you should develop a web application. You can develop a mobile version and a desktop version and thus support all the of the above platforms. Look at youtube's application for Iphone, it retains the same functionality as the the iphone app but is purely html. Furthermore, html5 capable browsers could also have the ability to run offline.
Crazy as it sounds, check out Flash/Flex - it is cross platform, code once, run everywhere ,now compiles down to native code on e.g. Android and iOS and the 10.1 player is shipping all over. I had to solve exactly this problem and when Flash Builder Burrito catered for mobile after working with it for a while I have switching from C#/Flash hybrid to Flash only for clients. (Our backend is C#/Node/C++, etc).
Depending on your timelines and needs it is something look into.
Some random links to peruse:
Blog post about performance and video to single app multi device
Developing flash and flex applications
I am working for a company where we are developing video chat support on an existing application. I have looked at various solutions for this like
Using Managed Direct show for video capture and streaming in C#
Some code samples in code project where we take an image and pass it over the network (I would call it rather a crude solution as this would eat up lot of bandwidth.
Code a compression algorithm from scratch from scratch and use it to compress-decompress video.
Now the challenge is that we are looking to achieve very high quality video streaming and the container application is coded in C#.NET
This is what I have proposed so far. The network logic to stream data is written in C# , the video compression to be written in VC++ and call this VC++ dll using pinvoke or either CLI which way possible.
I am looking for some one more experienced that me in this field who can suggest me if Iam going correct or can this be still improved.
The ultimate goal is high quality video streaming.
The codec can be any anything like h.2633, h.264 etc.
I've used several ways to get video streaming/conferencing with .net easily, without need to dig into directshow. (ok, dig some, but not deep :)
1) Use of plain Windows Media Encoder components. It is documented with samples in Windows Media Encoder SDK. Good for any high resolution streaming, but delay is too big for realtime chat (0.5-2 seconds at best). Modern Express Encoder SDK another option.
2) Microsoft Research ConferenceXP http://cct.cs.washington.edu/ Full featured conferencing API including application streaming. They too low level Windows Media coded filters and wrapped them into managed code. Works well. Easily customizable. Looks bit abandoned now.
3) Microsoft RTC Client up to version 1.3 - core of windows messenger.
pros: managed samples from Microsoft, good docs, reliable performance, freely redistributable, microsoft compatible (good) SIP stack included. Major conferencing vendors like Emblaze VCON based their solutions on it in some near past, not sure about this days, but I know that Tandberg licensed Microsft's VC-1.
cons: version up to 1.3 support h261-h263 video only. modern version with support of VC-1(h264) codec does not allow direct serverless ip-ip connections. It does at require Microsoft Live Communications server. Newer version SDK does not cover well video conferencing calls.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms775892(VS.85).aspx
Please let us know what platform you have chosen. By the way, I've even used ConferenceXP video rtp part with RTC 1.3 voice/SIP features together to improve video quality, so you have wide choice of managed technologies here. Another thing is Live Meeting at which I had no chance to take good look yet.
Save yourself the trouble and use VLC. There are some decent .NET wrappers for it (http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=52021&start=30)
We are using C# and VLC for an IPTV network. We take input off DISH network satellites via Osprey-450 video capture devices on a Windows XP server. From there, we have a .NET server component that we wrote in C# that uses VLC behind the scenes (starting separate processes in .NET to control the vlc.exe instances). The VLC processes transcode and stream the signals over a network (.h264 or MPEG-4, we've successfully done both).
On the client side we have a C# WinForm application that uses an embedded VLC Viewer to view multicast signals. This application is mainly for command & control. The real use of the multicast signals happens when our set top boxes attached to our TV's decode and display the streams.
We thought we were going to have to write our own DirectX encoders too, but don't go to all the trouble. VLC works really well and has enough C# support to be very useful. Feel free to e-mail me if you have specific questions about implementation.
You should check out the Ucentrik SDK. This SDK will enable you to integrate rich-media functionality such as video, audio, chat, remote-desktop sharing and control and video recording in your applications. The video codecs supported are VP8 (Google), Theora, and x.264. Additionally, the rich media traffic is encapsulated within an HTTP protocol to enable it to traverse firewalls that enable normal web traffic. This technology is completely free and you can download the SDK and request an API key so that you can evaluate without investing any time on setting up the infrastructure. In the next few months, we are releasing a server component so that you can download and host the infrastructure your self or your customer. The technology supports 1-to-many connections which means that you can create video conferences if you like. The features are highly modular so that you can integrate just the video or audio or desktop share or a combination of the technologies using the same SDK... You should request for an SDK available here: www.ucentrik.com. Additionally, there are some video's here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ucentrik
good luck.
Ucentrik has just released an open-source call-center application that integrates the CTX technology. This call-center application implements the video, audio, desktop/application sharing (with control), text chat functionality available from the CTX API. The application also includes some business logic specifically around providing the ability to route the calls to an agent that is available or have specific skill-set. The project is available at http://vcca.codeplex.com - please note that you will require access to the Ucentrik CTX SDK which is available for request on the Ucentrik website (www.ucentrik.com). Good luck.