I'd like to embed a simple WAV player into my Winforms program. It could look like this (derived from Media Player Classic):
I'd like the following 'features':
Controlling the slider of the sound/music shouldn't hog the other GUI's input (perhaps a background worker would help here)
The input will be WAVE for my requirements
There should be play/stop/pause buttons
The sound should play from a byte[] array in RAM (i.e. the WAV), and preferably not from a file
Granularity of slider should be fine (i.e. not like Youtube's coarse 'to-nearest-10-seconds' style)
Lightweight size (preferably already included in .NET if possible)
Low latency playing/stopping of sound (i.e. not waiting half a second after pressing the button)
After a little research, I found this low-level sound generation question and also something called NAudio. However, the former doesn't easily supply 'stop' functionality and has no slider code supplied. And the latter is a bit overkill (includes display of the WAV and many other features).
There's also the Windows Media Player control, but that's also a bit overkill (includes video etc.), and you apparently need to make sure that the required Windows Media Player version is installed on the user's computer, so compatibility may be an issue.
Anything, simple fast and effective here?
Related
I’m looking to use VLC as the foundation for a video player within my application written in C# (since VLC is one of the few players that can properly decode the format I’m working with), but the primary tasks that I need it to perform are:
Ability to browse between separate frames in a video file, both
forward and back.
Displaying a precise timestamp for each frame down to the
millisecond, and the ability to relay the timestamp to an
application.
Right now I’m doing this by means of a VLC extension LUA script, but the time VLC returns via vlc.var.get(input, “time”) lacks precision and can differ for the same frame in the same video file across multiple file readings. The frame browsing doesn’t work too reliably either. Plus, the values received in this way cannot be automatically relayed to another application.
I tried using the LibVLC.NET wrapper for libVLC, but I still couldn’t browse between frames, and the millisecond count values returned were rather odd. It’s almost like VLC (libVLC) doesn’t return an actual time value during playback but rather some sort of rounded value, a value with substantial delay when reading with precision down to the millisecond. The standard VLC interface can neither display precise time values down to the millisecond, nor browse between frames.
Is there any viable way to perform the two aforementioned tasks with VLC by somehow running VLC from an application written with the use of .NET? Or should I look into other options?
I am not sure that you can do that with VLC. But you can use this example which uses very good framework called ffmpeg
I am almost sure that you will be able to play your stream and navigate through. In addition there is another solution that you may use , I have to say that i am not familiar with it but it worth checking.
Basically try to find .Net implementation of video player instead of working VLC
I'm building a Windows Forms application in VS 2010 that smoothly increases or decreases the speed of a video playing back based on the speed of the user input.
I've tried several avenues..
1.) Using the AudioVideoPlayback DirectX class - I set the speed of the video, by setting the current position of the video, based on a timer.. and increased or decreased that value based on user input. While this worked on my PC, it lags a lot on our lower end target PC's. Can anyone think of a more efficient way to increase/decrease the speed of playback using this class?
2.) I've tried the Windows Media Player ActiveX control, and tried setting the rate/position dynamically, but this is extremely jumpy and laggy even on my development PC
3.) I've tried the Apple QuickTime Control 2.0 COM Component that comes with VS 2010, and it's also very laggy.
4.) I'm trying to figure out how to set the speed on the Shockwave Flash Object control, but haven't found that out yet
Can anyone suggest other avenues to explore? I just need to be able to increase/decrease the speed of video playback smoothly based on user input without lag. I don't care what format the video needs to be in, all videos can be converted to the required format.
Any help/ideas will be appreciated.
Thanks
The ultimate way is to decode the Bitmaps from videos, and handle the frames yourself.
Try the CaptureNET example from DirectShow.NET. It allows you to capture bitmaps from each frame. After that, write your own playback control to handle the refresh rate.
After trying many different formats/libraries and components I found the VLC Media Player ActiveX control to be the most efficient method to slow down/speed up video without any noticeable lag.
Lately, I've been trying to setup a media center PC. I've played around with all the common media center applications like XBMC, Plex, Boxee, and WMC. But all of them have one issue or another. So I was thinking about writing my own application from scratch.
My problem is I have no experience with developing software that plays media such as videos or music. I'm also not interested in spending a huge amount of time trying to figure this out, considering all the different file formats and codecs out there. I'm really more interested in developing the database and library interface for my application and reusing someone else's control or code for actually playing the media.
One option I was thinking was to just control an existing media player externally. So for example you may browse for a video to play in my application, and then when you hit play it would fire up VideoLAN or some other popular video player.
However, I was wondering if there was an easy way to play video inside a .NET application. I'm looking for something that is capable of playing a wide variety of formats such as MKV files, and DVD ISOs. I'm more experience with WinForms, but was also thinking about using this project as an opportunity to learn WPF.
i've spent many years looking at playing video under wpf.
The short answer
There is no easy way to guarantee to be able to play a variety of formats under wpf ( mkv,dvd etc etc ) or under windows for that matter.
the long answer
If you are looking just to run this at home and not release it, install all the codecs you need and most of the formats will run via mediaelement in wpf.
Getting all the codecs to cooperate can sometimes be frustrating.
Now moving into slightly harder territory.
if you want to play DVD then you need to replace mediaelement with wpfmediakit
http://wpfmediakit.codeplex.com/
wpfmediakit gives a base library to get access to the low level directshow functionality.
There is already a code base for playing DVDs based on wpfmediakit.
Now moving onto the very hard territory.
if you want to distribute your application and have users be able to "just watch" most/all media formats means you need to be able to completely control their codecs, which generally means distributing the codecs with your package and building the directshow filter graph in code rather than let windows build it.
The easiest way is to use the existing .Net hooks to Microsoft's standard MediaPlayer:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.mediaplayer.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd562851%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
was trying myself a while ago for something to play media in winforms, and found out there is vlc wrappers for .Net, dunno how good they are as i gave up, but you can try
here is one them:
http://vlcdotnet.codeplex.com/
Thanks for all the great answers. But just found out that VLC can actually be controlled through HTTP. So I think I'm just going to use that to point an instance of VLC running with the HTTP interface at whatever file I want to play.
Does anyone know how to apply effects to the entire screen, in c# or any programming language.
I'm mostly interested in making the screen monochrome (specifically green-white instead of black white).
I know a cross-graphic card solution is possible because I found a program that can do it:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/lv/magic-bl-product-page.asp
Anyone knows how to accomplish something this or where to look?
Thanks !!
There is no easy Windows API to modify the entire screen contents. But this could be done at the device driver level.
Otherwise you have to resort to some Windows API tricks: place a "fake" window over the entire desktop, in a loop: grab the entire screen contents without grabbing fake window contents, do your processing to get the monochrome effect, then display that on the fake window. Yes, it's hacky and slow, but possible. Even more hacky, when you get mouse clicks to "go through" the fake window (lots of SetWindowsRgn calls).
So cross-platform here means using GDI, though some older DirectDraw APIs might work, in that case, you have a much easier time with hardware overlays (and better performance). Though I'm not sure how many cards actually support hardware overlays, and if newer versions of windows support the older DirectDraw APIs.
One more possibility is if the video card has a C# or C++ or C API, then you can do whatever you want with the card without writing device driver code.
Then there's CUDA, but I haven't yet tried that out. I know it's for stream processing on nVidia boards, but I wonder if it could get you an easy backdoor into the video display stuff.
To help people in the future who are interested in this:
This is possible with the Magnification API's color effect method. This allows one to use a matrix that can be applied to the whole screen.
NegativeScreen is an open source project that implements the feature you are describing in C#.
Unfortunately, this only works with affine transformations, as the API takes only an augmented matrices rather than a delegate or something.
So I've been looking into the world of media playback for windows and I've started making a C# Media Player using DirectShow. I started off using the VRM-7 windowed video renderer and it was brilliant except it had a couple of small problems (multi monitors, fullscreen). But after some research I found that it's deprecated and I should be using VRM9.
So I changed it to use VRM9 windowless then found out that was an old post rofl >_< so finally I'm using Vista/Win7 (or XP .net 3) Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR) which is apparently the most up to date Microsoft video renderer and has all the flashy performance/quality things added to it. (tbh I haven't noticed any difference but maybe I need a blue-ray or HQ video to notice it).
With using EVR everything is working fine except resizing the video. Its really laggy/choppy/teary and probably something to do with its frame queueing mechanism.
To demonstrate my problem
open up windows media player classic.
View -> Options -> Playback -> output
Chose the "EVR" DirectShow Video renderer
Now restart wmp class and play a video, while it's playing click and drag a corner to resize it. You'll notice its horribly laggy. This is the exact same problem i am having.
But if you chose "EVR Custom Pres. **" or EVR Sync **" resizing works beautifully! So i tried googling around for anything about EVR resizing issues and how to fix it but i couldn't believe how little i could find. I'm guessing "Custom Pres." stands for "Custom Presenter" which sounds like they made their own.
Also you'll notice on the right hand size when you swap between EVR and the other EVR's the Resizer drop down on the right greys out.
So basically I wan't to know how I can fix this retarded resizing problem and is there any decent documentation out there? There is a fair bit for VMR7/9 but not much for EVR. I downloaded the DirectX SDK which apparently has samples but it was a waste of 500mb of bandwidth as it had nothing relevant.
Perhaps there is some way to force it not queueing up frames if that is the problem?
If you want code say the word and I'll paste some in. But it's really quite simple and nothing much happens, i'm convinced it's a problem with the EVR renderer.
EDIT: Oh and one other thing, what does VLC use? If you go into vlc options and change the renderer to anything but default, they all suck. So is it using VMR7? Or its own?
I need to write my own Custom Presenter, which from the looks of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530107(VS.85).aspx is a relatively big task.
Guess i'll look at the sample and try to go from there