what we are trying to achieve is a live stream using windows media encoder with only audio(wma files) - an online radio station basically. we need the song information(title and artist etc.) for each indivudual song that plays and perhaps a picture related to that song to display either in windows media player, or some other way(I would love suggestions on how to do this)
How would I go about doing this? Anybody have an idea?
Thanks very much
In what form do you have the song data and pictures?
The simplest thing may be to use Silverlight to play the stream back. Song names could be included in a script stream as captions, and URLs for the pictures in the marker stream.
Hi Ben,
Thanks very much for the response. At the moment the song data and pictures can be in any form really - we are really at the beggining of this project. This should probably be on the newbies thread because I know its not exactely advanced but no one seemed to respond there so I thought I'd try here.
Your idea seems to be the best one at the moment, I have been playing with expression encoder 2 to try and get something going with that but I cant really figure it out(and it keeps crashing for some reason). Ill play with it a little bit more and see if I can work it out.
Thanks for the help.
(01-19-2009 06:37 AM)benwaggoner Wrote: [ -> ]In what form do you have the song data and pictures?
The simplest thing may be to use Silverlight to play the stream back. Song names could be included in a script stream as captions, and URLs for the pictures in the marker stream.
Have you done that? In Silverligt (using Visual Studio and C#) I can read the markers of a stream through the mediaElement.markerReached event.
But as far I did'nt succeed in getting the metadata content of a stream (Author, Copyright, Description, ...).
This might be a bug in Silverlight:
http://silverlight.net/forums/t/17785.aspx
If someone knows a way for silverlight to get the metadata information of a stream, I would be highly interested.
Kind regards
Björn
(02-04-2009 04:25 AM)Björn Starr Wrote: [ -> ]If someone knows a way for silverlight to get the metadata information of a stream, I would be highly interested.
Silverlight 2 can't access that pro grammatically. The best way to handle that case is to pass the metadata along when you call Silverlight, or via a web service, or embedded as a marker at the start of the file.
Since Silverlight is turning complete and can access pretty much anything that'll respond to a http query, there's lot of ways to do anything with it
.
Hello,
I was wondering if anything has changed. Here's my problem:
I have a windows media stream with CC information embeded in the stream. Currently we use the WMP HTML object to set a caption parameter and then recall that JS function to read the caption as it changes during the video.
That said,
I'm upgrading to Silverlight for cross-platform purposes. However, I do not know how to access the information in the stream from within Silverlight. I need to know if it is possible to read the closed caption data from the stream and pass that to Silverlight and then parse it.
Please help.
Thanks!
Paul
Yeah, Silverlight can display the embedded script stream captions in your existing WMV files just fine, and with much more control over how the captions get displayed than you had before.
The simplest way to do this is to load the existing files into Expression Encoder 2, set the encoding type to "Source Profile" which just copies the file through, and pick a Silverlight 2 template. That'll make a nice player with a caption display toggle button.
All the templates come with full source code. You can use that to modify the font, positioning, etcetera of the captioning.
Hi Ben,
Thanks for responding.
I downloaded the Expressions Encoder 2 and played around with it. I'm still a little confused. So you are saying that the encoder can take a live windows media broadcast stream and read it's caption information? I don't understand how that would work.
At present, I can pipe this live stream right to my silverlight MediaElement and it displays and plays just fine. But I need that caption info that comes along with that stream. Are you saying that in order to read the caption info embeded in the stream already, that I have to pipe it through the Expressions Encoder and rebroadcast it? I'm confused as to how this would work. I also don't see where I can set any source other than a file in the Expressions Encoder.
Thanks,
Paul
Just to give a little more background into what I'm attempting:
Currently, I am using a Windows Media Stream and displaying it with a Windows Media Player Object in HTML. At encode, we are inserting closed captioning information which we then read in the WMP Object via the captioningID parameter of the Windows Media Player Object.
Fundamentally, what I want to do is throw this stream at a Silverlight MediaElement. This works, and it works great. It's stable and it's amazingly compatable across the board much better than the WMP HTML Object.
Now, I want to read my embeded CC data. Previously I was doing this in JS at the HTML level, but since Silverlight is really just a wrapper, I assume I have to read this data inside Silverlight since Silverlight is what is accessing the stream. I can't find a method for this. Now it looks like Expressions Encoder is for taking a source file and marrying the stream with text etc...at certain marker times, but I have this all done already. I just need to read data inside the stream which I know is already there but there doesn't appear to be a method for this. Please help or point me in the right direction.
Thanks much,
Paul