I want to provide a choice between streaming ‘channels’, if you will, in a web application. These are Windows Media streams of live events that are being broadcast from a Windows Media Services 9 distribution network.
I want to provide a relatively recent thumbnail image of the stream (as a user, you would expect to see this), but although I’ve seen this done in Flash on CNN and countless other sites, I’ve never seen this done with Windows Media.
I already have a C# / DirectX library that can extract a thumbnail from a WMV file, but obviously the stream doesn’t come from a file if it’s a live source.
My assumptions so far are:
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Will need to run some kind of service application/daemon that will receive a stream into a Windows Media Player object and somehow take thumbnails if WMPlayer supports it…
-or-
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Configure the streams to archive to file, and use the existing class library to take a peek at the last frame available in the archive file being written to get the thumbnail.
I would much rather do #1 because it seems like the clean solution, but don’t know if/how WMPlayer supports grabbing a frame.
Are there better ways of doing this?
Not sure if using media player is a good idea in such case. I would look into this:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/windowsmedianet/