I am writing a Silverlight application which displays large applications. It uses MediaElement and the user can scroll to any particular point in the video.
However, I don't want to have to host these large videos myself. What is the easiest/best option for hosting? (A sort of youtube for silverlight if you want)
If you don't care about smooth streaming you could put it almost anywhere.
For smooth streaming, you'd probably want a cdn that supports it like limelight http://www.limelightnetworks.com/2010/03/smooth-streaming/ .. Or use something like Amazon S3 or Azure Storage using this technique http://aldenml.com/blog/2009/12/11/how-to-smooth-streaming-and-windows-azure-storage/.
Some cheap hosters like Discountasp.net also support smooth streaming http://www.discountasp.net/sp_iis7manager.aspx
I don't know of any free youtube like places to host the video. http://silverlight.live.com used to be free, but is shutdown now.
Related
I am developing a webapp which the most challenging aspect is the 3D model section. It also contains other things such as drag and drop and a sliding bar with arrows each side which the user can go through to select different items.
I have been looking into WebGL but it seems IE doesn't support it without using a plugin. This isn't ideal so I was wondering what other options I have.
Flash? Silverlight? Anything else?
Silverlight is WAY too rare to be used for any meaningful development, and ajax is simply not stunning enuogh. That leaves us with Flash, which in my opinion, is the best of the three options. Flash Player 11 introduces the new Stage3D API which can create pretty stunning 3D graphics. There are also many AS3 libraries for 3D rendering. I prefer Away3D
Just found this, which looks promising.
http://iewebgl.com/
Edit: Disregard, seems the user has to download the executable for it to work.
at the moment flash is most popular plugin for 3D based web apps. which is cross browser, but no mobile browsers support :(
Many technologies and every one have his disatvantages
Currently in full development of a mobile application video sharing (based on PhoneGap), I hesitate about the method used to send / play videos on mobile. So I have a choice between using the HTML5 video tag (which apparently require an additional plugin so that there was no problem in android), and the establishment of an RTSP streaming server, which I think the native video player will be directly launch.
I want to know what would be the best solution to watch these videos without losing quality with the ability to navigate the time of the video.
Thank you,
Yeppao
Both streamed videos and embedded <video> elements will open in the native player (at the time of writing at least) and you won't be able to display video inline. See this recent question of mine.
So, at least to me, this boils down to the question if you can afford the streaming (both in terms of costs and maintenance) since a streamed video will always offer a better user experience (in case the streaming works properly...) than a downloaded one.
I've been developing a travel planning site - tripgrep.com - which is built on appengine, GWT and smartgwt, among other technologies. It is still early days, and the site is now working well on my development environment, which is either a windows or mac computer.
However, I am frequently talking up the website to my friends when we are at a bar or other venue, so I am standing there while they try to access the site via an iPhone, Android or Blackberry - I've witnessed all three. It has been painfully obvious that the browser based frontend takes a long time to download on a mobile device. I am pretty sure this is because of the javascript download for SmartGWT.
So, I would like to look at alternatives to SmartGWT.
What I like about SmartGWT is that it has a reasonable look and feel out of the box - I don't need to learn any design or css and it has an office application look. This is considerably better than the GWT built-in widgets, which just get a blue border. The better look-and-feel is why I went with SmartGWT early on. However, the slow load times are killing me on these mobile demos. So now I want a fast loading widget alternative that has good look-and-feel out of the box.
The features I care about are: tabs, good form layout, Google maps API integration, grid data viewing. If those are all available in a library that loads quickly on a mobile device, then that's the library I want.
Your best bet is probably just to use the standard GWT widgets and learn how to style them to your liking. SmartGWT's automatic styling is nice, but as you've noticed, it comes with a price.
Even GWT's standard widgets, which are lighter, could still be trimmed down for maximum speed, so if you're really adventurous you could roll your own light-weight widgets that do only what you need them to do.
You can try mgwt-also called mobile gwt...(available at http://code.google.com/p/mgwt/ )
You could write a wrapper for jqTouch... that would be cool.
Write a seperate View for your model, specifically for either a) mobile devices or b) iPhone speicfically (see "iui" f.ex.). That is the very best way to do it.
Since the launch of Silverlight 2 I was expecting a lot of full blown Silverlight applications popping up but still there seem to be little evidence of this. Does anybody know of such applications out there in the wild. And also what would be the obvious applications you would develop in Silverlight. I would say mail clients are bad examples as they just as well could be written as a web/ajax app. As Silverlight is far more powerful than web+ajax possible candidates should be impossible/akward implementing as a web/ajax app.
The ones that comes to my mind is
Photo and imaging editing apps
Reporting applications
Office applications, Word/Excel...
Edit:
Added from posts
Games
The point isn't that the app need to fill the whole screen just that it isn't just a small part of a webpage, or you could call it a full blown application running inside the webbrowser, only using the webbrowser as a host.
I think the Medical app that Microsoft itself developed shows pretty well what could be achieved with silverlight http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/
As for image editing then as I understand its a bit difficult as Silverlight lacks a Bitmap API to be able to do per pixel image editing...
Edit:
I noticed you added Word/Excel to your question and there comes the problem that Silverlight doesn't have a rich text editor built in and there hasn't been real good examples of custom implementations. There is one http://www.codeplex.com/richtextedit but I haven't seen any applications that actually use it.
I'm working on one in the medical domain.
This started as an update of a Mac classic application but due to the amount of work involved, broadened to considering other toolkits. I convinced them to go for an initial WPF desktop port to be followed by a Silverlight version.
I don't know one so far, but I could imagine that it could be used in a kind like the fullscreen video playback on youtube.
How many fullscreen desktop apps are there? Most application don't need the entire screen. If you don't want to be distracted by menus and taskbars and so you go fullscreen. Another type of applications that can use fullscreen are games.
You are limited in fullscreen to certain key presses such as arrow keys, tab, enter, and space so this rules out some of those types of apps. They have done this for security reasons so an app can't hijack the screen and record the keypresses, but I wish they could come up with a scheme to sufficiently warn the user then allow it if they consent.
An application Microsoft seem to like to show case is the AOL mail client written entirely in silverlight.
Personally I follow the rule is if you would not write it in flash you would not write it in silverlight preferring AJAX in most cases. In the past most large flash application have failed such as the flash word processor (cant remember the name) while AJAX enabled applications such as google documents have taken off.
Finally I believe until moonlight (linux and mac support) has been released and more general users have silverlight downloaded developers will be reluctant to use it widely even for smaller apps and gadgets.
I would like to bypass the web-server functionality of a Sony SNC-RZ30N network attached web cam and display the video feed in a Silverlight application.
I can't seem to find any examples of interfacing with the camera programatically.
Any leads would be much appreciated. Thx.
Update 09/09/2008: Found a good site with Javascript examples to control the camera, but still no means to embed the video in an iFrame or the like:
http://www2.zdo.com/archives/3-JavaScript-API-to-Control-SONY-SNC-RZ30N-Network-Camera.html
Doug
I don't know the details of the Sony network camera and the server side software. But what do you mean by web-server functionality - is that the UI that get served up to the users in form of a HTML page? Or is it something more, like a server capturing the video stream and transcoding it?
I think the direction you need to take is to first find the URL end-point of your video stream. Since it's a network camera I assume the camera has a built in IP-stack/HTTP server serving up the video stream. Once you have that feed you probably have to transcode it into a video format consumable by Silverlight. There are multiple tools you can use, but for Silverlight the preferred tool Microsoft Expression Encoder. It supports live transcoding of webcam video streams. I think it supports both Direct Show devices as well as video streams.