I am trying to evaluate which technology is best for my needs.
I need to display a video I get from some remote device, and let a user
interactively draw on it lines, polygons etc.
I searched and couldn't find any existing applications with this ability
(all the flash applications only displayed video).
Could anyone point me to such an application?
I haven't seen a specific app that allows you to do that, but I can tell you it would be fairly trivial to build it in Flex. You would simply create a transparent Sprite over the video clip, then use the Drawing API bound to various mouse events to do your drawing.
The final image can be saved by using BitmapData.draw() over the container that holds both the video and the canvas, and you can pass a bytearray encoded as PNG or JPG to a server-side script to save it.
I can't speak to Silverlight as I've never used it - but a Flex dev could build a basic sample of this for you in Flex in about 20 mins just as a proof of concept.
Where does your expertise lie?
Silverlight you could knock up a proof of concept rather easily and as Myk points out you could do the same in Flex. So your best bet is really whichever technology your current expertise lies in.
In Silverlight you could use a InkPresenter control above a MediaElement control in about 2 minutes up and running with a video file.
I think the hard part is finding a way to display realtime video from your specific device.
Silverlight supports streaming video so having that device talk with Windows Media Server or Silverlight Streaming sounds like the best bet.
Julie Lerman wrote an Silverlight app that you can draw on Images:
http://thedatafarm.com/blog/tablet/drawing-in-silverlight-article-in-msdn-magazine/
the article was presented at a magazine:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc721604.aspx
Hopes this helps.
Related
I don't have much knowledge about Windows Phone 7 development. I know there exist two paths for an app development. Silverlight or XNA. Before I start I would like to know for what scenarios Silverlight is the best choice and for what kind of apps it makes more sense to use XNA?
Silverlight is designed around building applications. As such, it includes a retained graphics model (re-drawing is handled for you) and wide range of user interface elements including both interactive controls and controls that perform layout logic.
XNA is designed around building games. As such, it includes an immediate graphics model (you must draw every frame) and game-friendly features like a content pipeline for importing graphics and low level audio support.
There is nothing stopping you using Silverlight for games and XNA for applications, but unless you have a good reason for switching it around you'll find yourself fighting against the framework while trying to do simple things.
Neil Knight mentioned you can use mix them in Mango, though the mix involves using XNA in a Silverlight application and not the other way around.
Microsoft provided a handy chart just for this type of question :)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402528(v=VS.92).aspx
Use Sliverlight if
You want a XAML-based, event-driven application framework.
You want rapid creation of a Rich Internet Application-style user interface.
You want to use Windows Phone controls.
You want to embed video inside your application.
You want to use an HTML web browser control.
Use XNA if
You want a high-performance game framework.
You want rapid creation of multi-screen 2D and 3D games.
You want to manage art assets such as models, meshes, sprites, textures, effects, terrains, or animations in the XNA Content Pipeline.
Combine Silverlight and XNA if
You want a XAML-based, event-driven application integrated with a high-performance game framework.
You want to create a multi-screen 2D or 3D game that incorporates a Rich Internet Application-style user interface.
You want to use Windows Phone controls along with art assets such as models, meshes, sprites, textures, effects, terrains, or animations in the XNA Content Pipeline.
You want to use Silverlight text rendering, including international text, instead of sprite fonts.
You want the page navigation model of a Silverlight application combined with the rich graphics power of an XNA Framework application.
Silverlight has a rich set of objects for building 2-d interfaces, especially 2-d interfaces composed of text, buttons, images. It's great for displaying data and taking in data.
XNA is meant for building out games or simulations, in particular 3-d, and gives you access to the device at a level somewhat closer to the hardware. XNA lacks the kind of objects that Silverlight does, but you get the flexibility to do more interesting things if you spend the time.
You may find this post useful further.
Greetings
I've read WPF utilizes DirectX so I'm wondering if it is possible to create a Game Overlay with WPF. I have tried with Winforms or WPF by itself and the transparent forms or windows always cause problems for streaming software thus I'm wondering is it possible to do the following:
Create a WPF application which shows a Window on the desktop with all the options needed for the overlay. Once all the options is filled in you can press Update and the Overlay is created in the game with all the information on it. The WPF app itself won't be visible on the stream. This means all the viewers will not have any trouble with it when the broadcaster changes settings.
More about the overlay
The overlay will be a scoreboard so it will need a set amount of info. For example:
So to sum up my question(s)
Can I make a WPF application which
dynamically creates a DirectX overlay
ingame?
Since it needs to work in DirectX9,
is this project possible to make by a
single dev (me) which has little to
no exp with DirectX?
If it is possible, where should I
start?
Thanks in advance for all your possible insights and replies!
What you want would be possible using D3DImage. It allows you to host any Direct3D content within WPF and also allows you to have overlay with transparency. Here is a simple example.
From your comment above, it sounds like your really trying to inject your overlay (at least from the user's perspective) into Starcraft II. You would almost have to host a copy of the directx buffer.
Also, besides WPF, you might want to look at XNA.
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.
In my company we have in mind a redesign of the user interface of an application and we would like to make it ... let say "fancy". We have in mind a simple story board but I doubt between WPF, XNA or DirectX. I prefer WPF so I'd need to know if it support the following capabilities and how difficult to implement are they:
Transparency: We'd like to display information layers on top of the main display.
3D support: We want network nodes (part of the interface is a network graphic) to be simple spheres connected with lines in a 3D enviroment, and the ability to control the camera so rotation of the screen is possible.
Effects: Such as shading, lens flare or glow to "signal" the discovery or deletion of a node.
Text animations: Specifically the ability to display the text as if it's being written... You know, the information text will be "filling" the panel top down, left to right...
Good news. WPF is the technology you want and it can handle your requirements with relative ease.
Transparency is simple.
3D support is good as well. For an example, check out Tim Sneath: Five Great WPF 3D Nuggets. You even get hardware acceleration.
Effects are definitely do-able via timeline animations.
The previous statement goes double for Text Animations.
...the hardest part would be the 3D support, but it's still going to be a lot easier than getting things done in XNA or using DirectX libraries directly.
AFAIK WPF 3.5 supports all of this, and even leverages hardware acceleration to get a decent performance.
It's possible to embed an XNA application in a WPF form so you could use XNA for the representation of your network and WPF controls for the GUI in front of it.
I'm thinking about making a simple map control in WPF, and am thinking about the design of the basic map interface and am wondering if anyone has some good advice for this.
What I'm thinking of is using a ScrollViewer (sans scroll bars) as my "view port" and then stacking everything up on top of a canvas. From Z-Index=0 up, I'm thinking:
Base canvas for lat/long calculations, control positioning, Z-Index stacking.
Multiple Grid elements to represent the maps at different zoom levels. Using a grid to make tiling easier.
Map objects with positional data.
Map controls (zoom slider, overview, etc).
Scroll viewer with mouse move events for panning and zooming.
Any comments suggestions on how I should be building this?
If you're looking for a good start, you can use the foundation of code supplied by the SharpMap project and build out from there. If I recall there were a few people already working on a WPF renderer for SharpMap, so you may also have some code to begin with.
I've personally used SharpMap in a C# 2.0 application that combined GIS data with real time GPS data, and it was very successful. SharpMap provided me the transformation suite to handle GIS data, along with the mathematical foundation to work with altering GIS information. It should be relatively straightforward to use the non-rendering code with a WPF frontend, as they already have presentation separated from the data.
(EDIT: added more details about how I used SharpMap)
It is probably a roundabout way of going about it, but you might find some useful stuff in the javascript and XAML from SilverlightEarth.com which a Silverlight 1.0-based map-tile-client. It can load VE, Google, Yahoo (there is a DeepZoom version that can load OpenStreetMap, Moon and Mars too; but since it uses MSI it doesn't really help on the WPF 3/3.5 front).
Although the javascript is a little untidy, you can clearly see it is creating a Silverlight 1.0 Xaml (dynamically sized) Canvas, filling it with tiles (Image controls) and handling zoom in/out and pan requests. You would need to make sense of all the javascript and convert it to C# - the XAML should mostly come into WPF unaltered. I have tested this Silverlight 1.0 with a Deep Zoom tile pyramid (and here) so the concepts are applicable (ie. not just for maps).
I know this works because I have done it myself to build the map viewer in Geoquery2008.com (screenshot) which is WPF/c#. Unfortunately the Geoquery2008 assemblies are obfuscated, but you might still glean some ideas or useful code via DASM/Reflector. It is still a beta so I wouldn't claim it is 100% done. I hadn't really thought of factoring out the map code into a separate control but may I will look into that if another one doesn't appear...
Incidentally I also started off with the ScrollViewer, but am planning to ditch it and mimic the javascript more closely so it's easier to re-use Image objects when panning/zooming (by gaining more control over the process than ScrollViewer provides).
These MSDN pages on the Virtual Earth tile system and the Deep Zoom file format and related links is probably also a useful reference.
Finally - I guess you've seen since this post that DeepZoom/MultiScaleImage is likely to be in .NET 4.0/Studio 2010.
Your desire to create a WPF mapping tool is similar to mine, which lead me to ask this question about DeepZoom (aka MultiScaleImage) from Silverlight. I want a WPF version. The accepted answer provides a link to a very good starting point (similar to your described thought process).
Virtual Earth has something favour to WPF
Don't know if you use ESRI software, but I hear there developing a Silverlight API for there stack so you might want to hold off.
It does not fall on my field of work at all, but you may have a look at MapWindow GIS, which has an Open Source ActiveX object that provides a lot of mapping and GIS features.
Here is a post explaining how to embed it on WPF applications:
http://www.mapwindow.org/phorum/read.php?13,13484
Download Bing Maps WPF Control sdk(Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.WPF.dll).Add as dll as referance,then change the XAML as below
**
<Window x:Class="WPFTestApplication.InsertPushpin"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:m="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.WPF;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.WPF"
Width="1024" Height="768">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
<m:Map CredentialsProvider="INSERT_YOUR_BING_MAPS_KEY"
Center="47.620574,-122.34942" ZoomLevel="12">
<m:Pushpin Location="47.620574,-122.34942"/>
</m:Map>
</Grid>
</Window>
**
The main question is how you store and access the items you are going to put in the map (assuming this isn't just a picture display). Lookup scenegraph for some ideas.
Also if you want it to be more than a toy image viewer the lat long to XY scaling can get 'interesting'
Don't build it yourself - use the WPF Bing Maps Control
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2012/01/12/announcing-the-bing-maps-windows-presentation-foundation-control-v1.aspx
the Bing Maps Windows Presentation Foundation Control v1 is best map control in WPF.
Support for tile layers – you can now overlay your own tile layers atop the map control.
Turning off the base tile layer – this is useful for when you don’t need/want to use our base map tiles and instead would prefer to use your own without overlaying them atop of ours.The control won’t request the tiles which reduces downloads and improves rendering performance.
SSL Support – since many of you are using the WPF control in secure applications, you can now make tile and service request over SSL without issue.
Hiding the scale bar – if you don’t want a scale bar (perhaps your map is small and the scale bar clutters the map) you can turn it off. In fact, the only elements you can’t turn off are the Bing logo and the copyrights.
New copyright service – provides accurate copyright for our data vendors. Additional inertia – inertia is now enabled for the mouse and is on by default for touch.
Miscellaneous bug fixes – thanks for the feedback on the MSDN Forums, the Bing Maps Blog, e-mail and Twitter. Good finds people.