Silverlight, streaming media, Windows Media, VC-1, H.264, Smooth Streaming

MediaStreamSource Takes On a New Life

March 26th, 2009 Posted in Silverlight

When the Silverlight team originally designed the MediaStreamSource API, its main purpose was to allow asynchronous reading of compressed video/audio samples from formats other than ASF. We took full advantage of this API to implement Smooth Streaming support in Silverlight 2. In Silverlight 3, the team decided to extend the API to also allow reading of uncompressed samples – YV12, RGBA and PCM. The primary goal behind this was to allow developers to build their own codecs. If you could parse a format and decode it in .NET - you could now play it back in Silverlight.

But one of the other potential uses for MediaStreamSource that emerged during SL3 development was video and audio synthesis. After all, why limit A/V creation to just decode from existing content? You can create a sound waveform or a raster bitmap using .NET math functions and then present it to the Silverlight runtime to render like any other audio or video.

Well, I was extremely happy to find out today that developers are catching on to this fantastic new feature. Namely, Pete Brown, a Washington DC-based .NET developer and evangelist has been using MediaStreamSource to synthesize video, audio and – my favorite – emulate a Commodore 64 computer!

Check out:

Creating Sound using MediaStreamSource in Silverlight 3 Beta

Silverlight 3 – Creating Video from Raw Bits using a MediaStreamSource

My MIX09 Silverlight 3 ShowOff Video – Commodore 64 Emulator

All awesome stuff. Way to go, Pete!

But what about custom codec development? If you’re a codec developer, I invite you to take a look at MediaStreamSource and consider writing a C# decoder for Silverlight. There are plenty of open-source codecs and formats out there that would make for fantastic Silverlight demos. Just to list a few:

Containers

  • Matroska
  • Ogg
  • Ogg Media

Video

  • Dirac
  • Theora
  • HuffYUV
  • Lagarith

Audio

  • Vorbis
  • FLAC
  • Monkey’s Audio
  • Shorten

These are just some of the codecs and formats out there with easily accessible source code that could be ported to C# or another .NET language. But of course, why stop there? There are also formats such as MPEG-2 TS, FLV, AVI, and codecs such as H.263, MPEG-4 ASP, MJPEG, MPEG Audio Layer II, and others that would be incredibly useful to have supported in Silverlight too.

Will you be the first to develop those?

  1. 6 Responses to “MediaStreamSource Takes On a New Life”

  2. By Pete on Mar 27, 2009

    Thanks Alex!

    Pete

  3. By Curtis on May 30, 2009

    Any idea if Smooth Streaming output works with the player in Windows Media Center?

  4. By Alex Zambelli on Jun 1, 2009

    No, not yet. Silverlight is currently the only supported client platform, but that’s likely to change in the future. Because the format spec is so new there was no time to get it into Windows 7.

  5. By Richie on Aug 28, 2009

    I am currently in the process of porting OGG Decoder into Silverlight MediaStreamSource. I already have it done in C#, just need to now port it into SL.

    :-)

  6. By LEE CHUL SUNG on Oct 29, 2009

    I try using MediaStreamSource for VC-1 Playback speed.

    Playback speed is very important for korean students. (I’m korean)

    Korean Students study very very hard. they have no time for normal speed, online lecture. usually they play vod lecture 1.5 or 2x speed.

    but I found out yesterday that I have no chance for using Silverlight Decoder output.

    If I don’t use raw a/v, silverlight decoder, I must make(or port) a decoder. but performance issue.

    May I have any method, access raw a/v ?

  7. By buchi on Dec 24, 2009

    youve got a nice blog here buddy, bookmark it already. ^_^

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