Streaming video from a live webcam

Question

I building a .NET 2.0 web site for a client which requires a live video streaming feature. i.e. a subscriber of a the site can stream live recording of a an event using his webcam (from his browser) and the guests he has invited can see it in their browsers.

I thought Silverlight 2 will bring in those feature but they are not avialble. I am not good at flash and making it work with my .net pages.

It is my fault that I commited to client before doing my research. I was hoping if you know of any simple way to accomplish this. I haven't worked on streaming stuff at all :(. Even if you know of a third party component that I can use with asp.net web forms it will be very very helpful.

Because of the stress and tension I am not able to google effectively to find it myself. Please Please point in the right direction.

Thanks Shreedhar

Answer 1

You want to get the videostream from the client? I don't think you can do this with silverlight nor with flash - both hide the hardware from the client machnine from your fingers - it's a security feature ;)

The only way I see is to let the customer download a stand-alone application that handles this (of course this will get nasty as soon as you want to provide apps for mac, linux, unix, windows, ...)

The problem is simple this: what you want is a way to let browers capture generic webcams and give the stream to your silverlight app - just think about this ... it's unlikely that we will ever see something like this.

Sorry.

Answer 2

I think Flash can ask for permission to use your webcam (and other things like your mic). Flash 8: Webcam Snowstorm for example seems to do that. Although I don't have a webcam here, so can't test it...

So I know you can get the video stream. No idea if you can send it though... but somehow that should be possible as well I believe... I mean, you do have sites that can record a message from you and send it somewhere? At least I think I have seen something like that somewhere...

Answer 3

I use 1AVStreamer. It streams live video from my webcam in MMS in the format mms://: like mms://192.168.1.101:8070 for example, and it creates and uploads a customized webpage to my website via FTP already with the live video feed in it. It is really simple, no hassle, and in no time you will have the live video feed on your website.

To find 1AVStreamer: http://www.pcwinsoft.com/1avstreamer/

Best, Alex

Answer 4

Hello, silverlight as u know is used for keeping all the UI at the client's side and the client can requests any additional resources as required. If u need to the client to upload his/her videos u need not be using silverlight for this purpose. As per your requirements u should provide a facility to upload these videos to the server.

Answer 5

Try looking at using VideoLAN's VLC.

This link looks like it might also provide some more ideas for you, even though it is not exactly what you asked: http://www.wikihow.com/Stream-Your-Webcam

As a variation on that page, You might be able to embed the VLC ActiveX object in your webpage and might be able to set the source to the webcam. That page has an example of setting the source to the directshow device for the webcam.

As far as having Silverlight talk to an ActiveX object, check out this other link: http://silverlight.net/forums/p/1896/4669.aspx

Good luck!

Answer 6

www.ustream.com does this using flash, not sure if you can glean anything from their implementation of this.