Streaming video library for C#

Question

I'm looking at options for adding streaming video to a social web site written in ASP.NET/C#. I have a great deal of experience with Flash too, so I'm comfortable using FLV players, but I'd definitely go Silverlight if the right library is available.

• The library would need to be able to encode user uploaded video in a web format.
• I imagine playback will be Flash or Silverlight based.
• It would need to create thumbnails of the video.
• It would need to have server software for streaming the video or have some 3rd party way of doing so.
• I don't mind paying a licensing fee for the software, so it does not have to be open source or free.
• The license must allow use on a commercial web site.

The closest thing I have found is MediaSoft's offering. But I never heard of this company before starting my search and don't know anyone using their software. They seem to be using FFMPEG to perform encoding, which I heard can spawn legal issues for commercial web sites. Though I'm not very familiar with the licensing of FFMPEG myself so please correct me if I heard wrong.

Has anyone used MediaSoft? Any other video libraries that you have used that worked well? Did you just end up writing your own video encoding and serving library?

Answer 1

Not sure about Silverlight, but Flash will render both h.264 and FLV videos. FFMPEG can convert into both via liblame for FLV and x264 for h.264. It can also generate thumbnails.

It and the corresponding modules are licensed under the LGPL/GPL which means you can use FFMPEG to generate videos/thumbnails without restriction as long as you have the rights to the original movies that you're transcoding. The GPL/LGPL license restrictions only apply to the FFMPEG code/binaries which won't matter until you decide to distribute those binaries to other people.

Answer 2

In addition to the above answer, you can look at red5 as a streaming solution http://osflash.org/red5