Live Streaming in Silverlight 4

A few days ago I started to deep into live streaming in Silverlight since I needed to insert a live IP broadcasting webcam in a Silverlight project.

As we know there is MediaElement that has a limited supported formats and a first approach was to provide the Source of the MedialElement with the link to the video live stream.

The problem in all this was that the webcam provided a stream in .mjpg format witch is not supported by Silverlight.

So I started to do research campaign on Google and went over IIS Smooth Streaming , which was very nice to see how easy you can make a smooth stream from a video at high resolution, but this was not fit to my problem from to main reasons:

1. I had no hardware aces to my webcam so I can make a Live Broadcasting Project in Expression Encoder

2. my stream was real live stream not a video that I could encode

3. I had no Server to encode the live stream

Here is the clasic wey with an existing video How Do I: Getting Started with Smooth Streaming

So the solution was either to make the webcam somehow broadcast a Silverlight supported format or to do an live encoding without using a Windows Server.

The encoding can be made either using ffmpeg.exe of using VLC media player.

I started to experiment different links an types of formatting supported by Silverlight ad I arrived to the conclusion that this is very good and looks good in Silverlight

http://91.121.173.78:8254;stream.nsv :sout=#transcode vcodec=WMV2,vb=5000,fps=30,scale=1,acodec=wma2,ab=128,channels=1,samplerate=44100}:std{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,dst=MyIP:PortNo} :no-sout-rtp-sap :no-sout-standard-sap :sout-keep

The link is from a live broadcasting TV named Hit Music TV , and the rest is the settings configured and generated in\by VLC.

To make a very simple test:

1. make a Silverlight project,

2. add a MediaElement

3. Open VLC , start a live stream Like This

4. Very important thing -> set the media Source like this

Where MediaUrl is the uri to the Live stream

Also pay attention to the port on which you start the local stream , usually is 8080.

The thing that I didn't like about all this is that every time I waned to start a VLC stream I had to manually introduce the parameter for the stream, and all settings, so I've found the way to lunch the VLC from command line and start the stream directly from a WPF application.

To facilitate all this and show all this in a more presentable way I had created a small Silverlight 4 application and an Expander with the links for the Stream Sources and a window so you can create either a Media element or a Medial Player control to display the stream from the provided link.

Here is a video that illustrates the functionality of this small project.

Since the point here is Live stream in Silverlight I, will not get into project details here.

Here is a video of projects Silverlight and WPF.