C# Video Player Component with Stream Access for Decryption - c#

I am searching for a video player component (windows), usable in .Net (C#). What is required, is an access to the underlying stream, because parts of the video should be decrypted on the fly, and the decrypted video should never be stored on the hard disk. Ideally, it should also be portable for Linux and Mac.
Anyone knows some good video components featuring the requirements?
Thanks!

Found two solutions for the problem, since I could not find a component flexible enough.
Here are the solutions:
1. A custom video player, composed of demux+decode and a rendering (to directx or opengl for example).
2. A virtual hard disk with a decryption layer, we implemented this solution, based on dokan vhdd driver.

Related

Playing media from byte stream in .net

I am developing application that receives media content(.mp3/.mp4/.avi) in form of bytes.
However, as WPF doesn't support playing media from stream, So I started with WMP.dll.
I am creating class library that receives media in form of bytes and media format and play media accordingly.
Referring Creating the WMP Programmatically, however, I didn't find method to pass bytes stream.
So My question is how do I play media from bytes using wmp.dll?
Edit: I am using WMP.dll using COM located at C:\WINDOWS\system32\wmp.dll
I've been through this process a long time ago ...
Basically I would advise you NOT to go down the WMP route at all. It's heavy, cumbersome and not very nice to work with. I encountered lots of issues along the way basically. Least of all it being feature rich (which it isn't).
The best solution I found and the one I'm still using now is a library called BASS from Un4SeenDevelopments.
This library is tiny < 100k and basically it's awesome. Never had a problem with it and it has it's own .NET wrapper that is a free download from the site.
The support is amazing and the compatibility via a massive selection of plugins and additional libraries is staggering.
Highly recommended for what you want to do.
"BASS is an audio library for use in software on several platforms. Its purpose is to provide developers with powerful and efficient sample, stream (MP3, MP2, MP1, OGG, WAV, AIFF, custom generated, and more via OS codecs and add-ons), MOD music (XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX), MO3 music (MP3/OGG compressed MODs), and recording functions. All in a compact DLL that won't bloat your distribution."

C# and Audio Generation/Playback

I’m making an audio synthesizer and I’m having issues figuring out what to use for audio playback. I’m using physics and math to calculate the source waveforms and then need to feed that waveform to something which can play it as sound. I need something that can 1) play the waveforms I calculate and 2) play multiple sounds simultaneously (like holding one key down on a piano while pressing other keys). I’ve done a fair bit of research into this and I can’t find something that does both of those things. As far as I know, I have 5 potential options:
DirectSound. It can take a waveform (a short[]) as a parameter and play it as sound, and can play multiple sounds simultaneously. But it won’t work with .NET 4.5.
System.Media.SoundPlayer. It works with .NET 4.5 and has better quality audio than Direct Sound, but it has to play sound from a .wav file and cannot play multiple sounds at once (nor can multiple instances of SoundPlayer). I ‘trick’ SoundPlayer into working by translating my waveform into .wav format in memory and then send SoundPlayer a MemoryStream of the in-memory .wav file. Could I potentially achieve control over the playback by altering the stream? I cannot append bytes to the stream (I tried) but I could potentially make the stream an arbitrary size and just re-write all the bytes in the stream with the next segment of audio data every time the end of the stream is reached.
System.Windows.Controls.MediaElement. I have not experimented with this yet, but from MSDNs documentation I don’t see a way to send it a waveform in memory without saving it to disk first and then reading it; I don’t think I can send it a stream.
System.Windows.Controls.MediaPlayer. I have not experimented with this either, but the documentation says it’s meant to be used as a companion to some kind of animation. I could potentially use this without doing any real (user-perceivable) animation to achieve my desired effect.
An open source solution. I’m hesitant to use an open source solution as I find they are typically poorly documented and not very maintainable, but I am open to ideas if there is one out there that is well documented and can do what I need.
Can anyone offer me any guidance on this or how to create flexible audio playback?
http://naudio.codeplex.com , without a doubt. Mark is a regular here on SO, the product is well alive, there are good code examples.
It works. We built some great stuff with it.

Best way to implement audio playback

I'm working on an application that will read in file paths and play audio files. I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible--by using existing codecs and free/open utilities. I'd like some suggestions on the best way to do this. I've had two ideas, both involving FFmpeg:
Create a simple GUI that allows the user to read pass in file(s) to be played, and then a ffplay.exe process is run in the background to play the file(s).
Go more in-depth by just using libavcodec and basing my project off the functionality available with that.
There are only a few main goals I have for this.
Be able to read in and play multiple files without breaks between them
Start playback at an arbitrary spot (based on a percent of total duration) within the track
Stop playback after an arbitrary amount of time, and move to the next track
Which of my two methods seem the most practical for this project? Is there a better--or perhaps less feature-intensive--alternative to FFmpeg that you would suggest.
This is for a Windows application written in C#.
Edit: One of the reasons that I started with FFmpeg is that it can handle many file types, notably MP3, AAC, Flac.
Edit2: If the use of libavcode.dll is the best option, it would also be helpful to get some info on implementing that in C#.
The BASS audio library has C# bindings and works very well with common audio formats (e.g. MP3) with plug-ins for other formats (e.g. AAC).
However, for commercial development, you require a license to use BASS.

How to grab thumbnail every X seconds from *live* Windows Media Stream

I want to provide a choice between streaming 'channels', if you will, in a web application. These are Windows Media streams of live events that are being broadcast from a Windows Media Services 9 distribution network.
I want to provide a relatively recent thumbnail image of the stream (as a user, you would expect to see this), but although I've seen this done in Flash on CNN and countless other sites, I've never seen this done with Windows Media.
I already have a C# / DirectX library that can extract a thumbnail from a WMV file, but obviously the stream doesn't come from a file if it's a live source.
My assumptions so far are:
Will need to run some kind of service application/daemon that will receive a stream into a Windows Media Player object and somehow take thumbnails if WMPlayer supports it...
-or-
Configure the streams to archive to file, and use the existing class library to take a peek at the last frame available in the archive file being written to get the thumbnail.
I would much rather do #1 because it seems like the clean solution, but don't know if/how WMPlayer supports grabbing a frame.
Are there better ways of doing this?
Not sure if using media player is a good idea in such case. I would look into this:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/windowsmedianet/

Is it possible to transcode audio in C# using DirectSound?

I want to transcode a lot of audio from its source format to PCM without resampling or messing with the sample size. I figure if Windows Media Player can play the file and it doesn't use a legacy ACM codecs it must be using DirectSound to do so (this is on Windows XP and Windows Server 2k3). So is it possible to access DirectSound from C# and do so? I've tried searching the web but all the examples have been about playback which I have no interest in doing.
DirectSound is an audio playback API, you mean DirectShow. Windows Media player does use DirectShow to play audio files. In theory, all you need to do is build the same playback graph that media player uses, but replace the audio driver on the end with a .WAV writer filter.
This is somewhat easier to do in C++ code, since the DirectShow graph object is really designed to be called from C++, but with a good set of interop definitions, you can do this in C#.
There's http://directshownet.sourceforge.net/ for serious hacking with DirectShow in .NET, but that's probably overkill for your problem.
I would suggest getting a copy of GraphEdit if you don't already have one. You can use it to "prototype" direct show graphs interactively. drop a file into graphedit. then delete the filter on the end and replace it with a file writer filter.
One problem you will have is that there is no .WAV file writer filter in the default set of o DirectShow filters, you will have to find or write one.
If you just want to get the files converted, and could care less about learning how to write code using DirectShow, I would suggest that you just get a copy of Sound Forge (possibly even a demo version). It has a scripting language (C#,vb) that can be used to easily batch process most audio file formats.
Conversion to WAV can be done from the Windows command line using SoX (Sound eXchange, http://sox.sourceforge.net/). You could write a batch file or a C# application that calls SoX with the proper attributes. I'm not sure how WinAMP's feature works specifically, but it has a file writer output option built in as well. You can stream the entire playlist to wave files.
Have a look at this article on CodeProject about audio conversion here and here.

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