I am interested in creating a simple HLS Viewer for the Xbox 360 that works kind of like SilverLive. I have read about as much documentation oh HLS that I can find and am not sure where to continue. I feel like I could probably write the code to handle HLS myself, it doesn't sound overly complex (unless there is something I am missing). I do not however, have any idea where to start with playing the video/audio segments on the 360 once they get there.
What does everyone think? Would I need to implement some sort of codec pack and use that to render the frames as a texture? If so, are there any functional codecs supported by .NET for mpeg2 and aac that don't use anything the 360 has no support for?
Unfortunately XNA Framework games are not able to access the Internet (or perform any network communication at all other than through Xbox LIVE or System Link), so creating a streaming application isn't possible.
What you want to achieve is possible using the professional development tools, but your game/application wouldn't pass the certification requirements for release on the Xbox 360 (because of its use of the Internet/LAN).
Related
Can anybody give me a link to a working example of playing background live-streaming audio in Window Phone 7 (or 7.1)? I saw a lot of examples (in microsoft.com too) and noone of them works correctly for playing a background live-streaming audio.
FYI, here's an url of live-streaming audio http://radiozetmp3-02.eurozet.pl:8400/
Background audio is not supported on 7.0, only 7.1 (and above).
If you want to play streaming audio in a format/codec which is not natively supported by the phone you must do it with an AudioStreamingAgent. If it is a supported codec, you can use an AudioPlayerAgent (see sample here).
Using an AudioStreamingAgent is a nontrivial task and requires a deep understanding of the codec you need to play so you can convert it to something the phone understands. I know of one person who did this, for a H.264 stream, and it took a long time and much hair pulling to get it working. And before anyone asks: No, they are not able to share code from that project.
If you really must go down this route, the ManagedMediaHelpers (previously here) are a good place to start, but yes, they don't cover all codecs and this is, potentially, very complicated and not something well documented on the web.
I have an old computer vision experiment that uses Video for Windows to grab frames from a camera connected to the PC. It's a hack, it uses VfW to create a preview window, then it does a GetDIBits from the window DC.
I'm finally ready to port this to DirectShow. My understanding was that I could grab frames from a video capture graph by using ISampleGrabber, but now I read that ISampleGrabber is deprecated.
What's the non-deprecated way to grab frames from a video feed? Do I have to implement my own DirectShow filter that does essentially what ISampleGrabber does?
DirectShow is not deprecated; just the DirectShow Editing Services. I would strongly recommend using DirectShow because of the much wider level of support, unless there are specific features of MF that are needed.
There's been no development of DES for some years, but the sample grabber is a widely-used filter that is somewhat independent of DES. I would be happy to recommend that you use it. If there is an issue in future versions of windows, it would not be more than a day or two's work to replace the filter.
G
I think Windows Media Foundation would be your best bet if you are only targeting Vista/Win7, otherwise you can still use DirectShow/SampleGrabber approach, I doubt it will be removed any time soon. Related question here.
Before reinventing the wheel, I'd better check out if there are solutions I can buy or get for free?
I want to make a little web radio streaming app for my sister. Maybe there's a library that can play streams from the web?
VLC is an open source player that can also be uses as a streamer
see also :
Which frameworks / libraries should I take a look at when I want to play an audio livestream on the iPhone?
You may want to check out wowza
We currently have a system with live video encoded to an MPEG-TS multicast stream, being received by televisions with STBs. In addition to televisions we'd like to embed the video in our Windows application.
I know that VLC will receive the stream, but would prefer both a solution that I can embed in an existing application without playing window moving games, and one without licensing problem. I realize that likely means that I'm not looking at a free solution, that's fine, within reason.
Anyone know of a good product for this? Either something easy to use, or a plug-in for WMP.
You'll need to develop a simple DirectShow filter that listens on a given port and just passes down every packet it had received.
I don't have a sample handy, but it's really simple, several hundreds lines of code.
Then you just connect this filter to an MPEG2 Demultiplexer capable of decoding transport stream.
NVidia and Elecard come to mind first, though the former one does not connect under debugger.
Then you connect the demultiplexer to the decoder and finally to the renderer.
The demultiplexers and decoders handle the live stream issues well, you just capture the UDP packets and send down to them.
Due to licensing issues, MPEG2 decoders cannot be free (ffmpeg and VLC violate the license), so you'll have to buy the decoder.
Visit http://elecard.com, they have a nice range of MPEG2 products.
Expanding on Quassnoi's answer...
You might check out the Haali Media Splitter to act as a "MPEG2 Demultiplexer." This is a filter that just pulls the compressed video and sound out of the transport stream, so I'm guessing it doesn't have any licensing issues. Most PCs with a DVD player on them already have a licensed DirectShow MPEG2 decoder, so you can probably just use one that's already installed (or purchase a license from a place like elecard if you really want to be safe).
As you are developing your DirectShow application, you might find Monogram GraphStudio to be a helpful tool in designing the filter chains.
I'm making an application where I will:
Record from the microphone and do some realtime processing on the input
Play an MP3 file (a regular song), but manipulating the output in realtime
Every now and then I'll need to play additional sounds over this song too, but I guess I can do that by simply adding the buffers.
In short, I need to have circular buffers for both recording and playing, and I need to be "feeding" the output buffer every 20 ms or so with the new data that is just about to be played.
I've been looking at DirectSound, and it doesn't seem to help a lot. The reading and writing to the output buffers seem very similar to Win32, the only place where it seems it'd help is in playing the "additional sounds" over the main song.
Should I use DirectSound, or should I go straight to raw Windows APIs?
Is DirectSound going to do anything for me?
Thanks in Advance!
The Directsound API's give you better realtime control. They are also the supported way to use sound in Windows. I was under the impression that the win32 api's were depracated, but I could be wrong on this.
This question is close to yours
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/314522/what-is-the-best-c-sound-api-for-windows
also
Is DirectSound the best audio abstraction layer for Windows?
last but not least, this is what microsoft has to say http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd370784(VS.85).aspx
Neither? :)
The story is that DirectSound is the replacement for waveOut, but DirectSound joined DirectInput as deprecated APIs in Vista and is replaced with WASAPI. DirectSound and waveOut are implemented on top of the User-Space WASAPI in Vista. On XP, waveOut and DirectSound feed to the same kernel level Mixer API.
To consolidate all of these interfaces take a look at something like OpenAL, it's a well supported audio standard along the same lines as OpenGL.
It sounds like you're going to be quite sensitive to latency. It might pay to look at ASIO
I found Harmony Central - Audio Programming. Also read w:DirectSound.
Windows Vista features a completely
re-written audio stack based on the
Universal Audio Architecture. Because
of the architectural changes in the
redesigned audio stack, a direct path
from DirectSound to the audio drivers
does not exist.
Because of Xbox 360 and Microsoft
Windows integration, Microsoft is
actively pushing developers to migrate
new applications to equivalent Xbox
audio APIs such as XAudio and XACT.
OpenAL looks promising.