Video thumbnails in WPF - wpf

I'm trying to add videos to my WPF project, but I can't find a proper solution for generating previews/thumbnails of the video. A lot of solutions on the internet mention you should play and then pause the video in code behind. I don't really like that solution especially because it gets very messy in combination with the MVVM structure of our project.
Another solution I thought of is generating a screenshot from the video and display that screenshot instead of the video, but I also have no success in creating the screenshots.
How do you guys show thumbnails of your videos?


You do this by setting the MediaPlayer's property of ScrubbingEnabled to true and still you need to move forward to capture any movie at real time.
For more samples, please read this nice blog entry by Clint Rutkas:
http://www.betterthaneveryone.com/archive/2009/10/02/882.aspx


You can use ffmpeg.exe to generate thumbnail for your video as a jpg file,
ffmpeg -itsoffset -4 -i test.avi -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 test.jpg
Which is simpler way to do it, because by default we only show Thumbnail image and media element is hidden or inactive, and only when we click on it, we start playing the video. This also improves resource usage as media element is heavy if you are displaying multiple videos.

Related

How to run ffmpeg from WPF?

I want to cut videos and add background music using timestamps using FFmpeg in my WPF app.
My app is totally basic.
I have a button to select file And field for timestamps
I am able to cut videos using cmd. But how can I do that in WPF?

How do I prevent subtitles from showing up on my MediaElement?

I'm trying to create my own Media Player application using a WPF MediaElement. I know that the MediaElement actually uses Windows Media Player as its source and that's why it also loads the .srt (subtitle) file and shows subtitles below the video.
My application is actually supposed to override default subtitle rendering and show its own version of subtitles, so I need the MediaElement to ignore loading and displaying the .srt file.
How do I do this through WPF?

Thought I answer it for other people.
Loading subtitles may be related to the CODEC that's being used. Modifying the configuration of the CODEC through the configuration app it was provided with must solve the problem.

Render Silverlight Animation to video file

I need to be able to render a silverlight storyboard animation to video. The animated content itself could be simple UIElements, Images or even two or more videos playing at the same time.
Several ideas came to mind like RenderTargetBitmap on a single frame basis, but:
1) I've never tested this against video embedded content
2) Don't know how to actually compose the video from the generated images.
Expression Encoder was also on my mind, but I don't know if it's possible to integrate it in a Silverlight/XBAP app to fulfill what's expected from it.
What's your opinion on this?

Your best bet if you just need to capture this sort of thing would be to use the Expression Encoder 4's screen recording feature, or a tool like TechSmith Camtasia.

Issue using WPF MediaElement with HD (H.264, 720P) Video

I am using media element to render video in WPF. All videos are working fine except H.264 videos. They have some stuttering problem while they are rendered on screen. My machine configuration is much more than the recommended requirement to play for this video. Another surprising fact is that the video renders perfectly fine when I play this in Window Media Player or any other player.
Any solution or any alternative to MediaElement?

You can try my MediaUriElement from my open source project here: http://wpfmediakit.codeplex.com
It has better media compatibility than MediaElement, but if it's a decoder filter problem or a performance problem, my project won't be able to help. What h264 codec are you using. You may want to try out ffdshow from http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/.
-Jer

WPF does not support H.264 videos

Getting .png pixel data in Silverlight

We have a Silverlight application that needs to load a number of .png files. We can load the images OK, but Silverlight doesn't support reading the pixel data from the Image class.
Can anyone suggest a simple solution for getting at this data? Our current best bet would be a third party .png loading library, but we are having trouble finding a suitable one.

There is no built in classes for doing pixel based imagine manipulation/generation i n Silverlight. You need to implement your own PNG Encoder/Decoder that works on an byte array containing the image information. Joe Stegman has implemented one such encoder you should check out. He got lots of great information about "editable images" in Silverlight over at http://blogs.msdn.com/jstegman/. He does things like applying filters to images, generating mandlebrots and more.
This blog discuss a JPEG Silverilght Encoder (FJCore) you can use to resize and recompress photos client size: http://fluxcapacity.net/2008/07/14/fjcore-to-the-rescue/
Another tool is "Fluxify" which lets you resize and upload photos using Silverilght 2. Can be found over at http://fluxtools.net/
So yes, client side image processing can definitely be done in Silverilght 2. Happy hacking!

PNG decoding is hard to find.
I wrote an article for MSDN that includes some open source code I cobbled together from Joe Stegman, FluxCapacity, and a few others. It includes PNG decoding (as well as GIF, JPG, and BMP) for those in this thread that are looking for that.
http://www.microsoft.com/youshapeit/msdn/ExpertKnowledge/2008-10/InnovateWithSilverlight2.aspx
If you don't care for my implementation of it for Silverlight, then you can go straight to what I modified for PNG decoding: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pr2/
Cheers!
Update: It looks like they no longer offer the source code on the site, so I re-posted the content here:
http://dimebrain.com/2009/01/innovate-with-silverlight-2-article-code-available.html

Thanks - I've seen the Joe Stegman blog. It's very handy, but the decoder he doesn't have is a PNG one. We're using PNGs as we need transparency. The fluxtools link seems to be broken too.
I'm still looking (unsuccessfully) for a PNG decoder I can drop into Silverlight.

One option that may (depending on circumstances) be easier is to save the color data and transparency data separately, then programmatically apply the transparency to the image once you have it loaded. That way, you could save the image as a 8-bit gif representing the alpha channel, plus a jpg or bmp or whatever for the color data.

Dimebrain - that msdn link you provided doesn't have a valid link to the sourcecode - any chance you have a link to the source that works?

Resources