ask for easy to use Silverlight player sample - silverlight

My purpose is simple, to find a sample which is just enough for my usage other than reading a long page sample. :-)
My requirement is very simple, just embed a Silverlight player into web browser to play some specific videos, the videos are hosted on an IIS server, some are wmv format and some others are flash format.
Any quick to reference samples? :-)
thanks in advance,
George

Download Expression Encoder and grab the various templates you wnat from there (it also has the ability to auto-publish to silverlight.live.com for streaming, so we can handle the burden of video hosting as well - for free! :)
Under the Output tab, you'll have a pick from a bunch of templates there (pick which one takes your fancy, and grab that code and cut & paste it into your said page)
Scott Barnes / Rich Platforms Product Manager / Microsoft.

Related

Which web-technology could I use to highlight parts of an object, and spin it 360 degrees (in one direction)?

The website will grab data from a database telling it which part to highlight, on any of 4 models.
Please tell me which web-technology would be best for this.
Thanks,
Alec Taylor
I can point you toward those two open source choices:
Adobe Flex (Needs Flash Player and JavaScript enabled on client)
HTML5 Canvas Link1 Link2 (Needs HTML5 support on client's browser)
You can also have a look at Microsoft Silverlight but it relies too much upon MS Technology

Is Silverlight ready for commercial website aimed towards non-savy-computer users

My concern is that novice users will turn their back to a website which asks them to install Silverlight.
One of the reasons I think they might be scared of installing Silverlight is because they are not aware of what Silverlight actually is.
What's your take on this?
You can see the website riastats.com for information on install base, the main thing is if Silverlight gives an advantage such as the NBC Olympics coverage in United States uses Silverlight because of the Smooth Streaming technology plus the ablity to have a Live DVR where live streams can be "rewound" - all these features are probably better supported by Silverlight has the Client and Server ends can be well integrated (with Microsoft solutions).
I may be a little biased as I am a Silverlight developer, but with a less than 5MB download for runtime, that helps sell it more - especially as it may be a better alternative than the Flex download for Flash if this is required to create a solution that would have worked in Silverlight as it is a larger download.
Check out the silverlight.net showcase you'll see who and where it is being used - you can then make your decision based on this - rather than a few opinions (including mine!).
Well Silverlight is installed on about 50% of pc's now. So it depends on your market. Normal web users (ie. non-developers) tend to install anything you prompt them to if you can clearly and succinctly give them a compelling reason to run your application.
It doesn't tend to matter outside of the work place environments if you use silverlight or flash. What's more important is that your application will solve a problem the user has, and you can communicate that well.
They do not know what is is, marketshare is around 40%. I'd say it's not ready if you want to reach everyone.
However if Flash or javascript is not an option, give a firsttime visitor window informing your clients about silverlight.
I think you're going to have a lot of users on the public internet that don't have it installed. If you're really going for a mass-market site, and you aren't doing a crazy amount of media-rich type content, I would go with something like JQuery to make your Javascript easy and cross-platform.

How do I play movies in a C# WinForm application

I am trying to play a movie (wmv,avi,mpg,etc.) in a winforms application. I would like the user to be able to start, stop and pause.
I'm not looking for a full answer ... I just need pointed in the right direction. I've already did some searching on google but could not find anything useful. I can continue searching but I know the stackoverflow community rocks.
So, please point me in the right direction!
Thanks.
I think this is probably the path of least resistance:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb383953.aspx
You could use Windows Media Player ActiveX control.
You could also embed a WPF control that contains a MediaElement control.
Another alternative is to use the VLC library instead of Windows Media Player. The VLC Forums have a number of wrappers that can be used in C#.
I have not done a comparison of VLC versus Windows Media Player, but it is alot less resource intensive then the WPF media elements.
If I remember correctly VLC also has built in support for alot of video formats, potentially making it a better choice I guess.
One possibility is to use the Forms.WebBrowser class. This will give you an embedded web browser so you can install what ever player and plugins you need.
It depends on how complicated you want to get, but I've had luck implementing DirectShow before. It's definitely more complicated than a drop on control, but it's really flexible for different formats and loading codecs.

Realtime 1394 firewire video in a WPF app via directx or other method

Are there any controls that anyone is aware of that I can use to stream firewire video into a WPF app. I do not need camera control or capture just the video. I need WPF hosting because I'll be adding WPF content on top.
I was hoping that with the addition of having direct X surfaces in WPF something like this might appear.
Ideally looking for something relatively high level (not a direct show guy at all).
Thanks,
Brian
There are a couple really good video rendering packages for WPF. This guy Jeremiah Morrill has a blog where he discusses his numerous render projects. There's the WPF Win32 render project, and a number of low-level techniques he documents for how to access accelerated playback, Media Foundation .NET, DVD controls, etc... I believe his blog is titled "Jer's One Stop Shop".
Reading over his blog in general is a good idea if you are in to video/WPF. Last I checked, "MediaKit", one of his more comprehensive projects, enables easy use of DirectShow (simple xaml and your off and running, so don't worry) and other well known native interfaces. It's very robust and actively maintained, if not that specific project, check into some of the recent API's he's contributing on, some various Win7 media support also.
The only reason I'd bring up this other project, Augmented Reality, is that you remarked about adding content "on top". You should definitely check out wpfAugRel if your doing a lot of video production. Where to get an add on for it eludes me, but I'm sure you can find it off that site, but it allows for you to script in python some fairly slick real-time video production.
-- edit --
Right, look at this google code page, it has some video's (picture's worth a thousand words right?), but regardless, it allow's you to mix in 3D content into live-action, through the use of "marker" prop's, essentially bit's of paper with some easily machine recognizable feature's, that facilitate their underlying engine to inject computer rendered output into a real world scene, highly dynamic, so you can toss these marker's around and the 3D content move's fluidly... anyhow good luck.
Check out this article by UberDemo. It captures video into a WMV file with Windows Media Encoder and WPF. There is a paragraph about how to do the preview in a WPF application.

PowerPoint and WPF

I really need a way of loading a .ppt document in my wpf application. Can anyone give me a hint, code sample?
Checkout the following discussion thread. Also Dr.WPF got an interesting article that might help you as well: Hosting Office in WPF Application
However consider license costs will be quite high for your scenario...
According to this artice the DSO Framer is no longer supported. Have to look for something else.
You may need to elaborate a bit more on your particular need to get a practical answer.
I don't think hosting PowerPoint (ppt) is a good option because it requires ppt to be installed on the target machine.... and if the target machine has ppt then you can use its API to save the document as HTML and open it in a WebBrowser control.
If the target machine doesn't have powerpoint you may look into some online file conversion service and try hooking up there to convert to HTML and still use WebBrowser control.
I definitely don't recommend wasting your time with DSOFramer - it's very unstable at best and it will just feel like you're one step away from making it work for a while but it doesn't work.
Another option is of course to write your own parser for ppt files, the OfficeOpenXML version of the files is definitely "parseable". I've done that for Word docx and it's relatively easy to get the course data out of the document - say shapes, text... - but the devil there is in the details. There are a zillion little features to implement.

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