folks!
I'm trying to transcode a compressed .avi file to .wmv using Media Foundation. While I've succeeded in using MSDN's sample for transcoding to handle an uncompressed .avi, I've had no luck with several different types of compressed .avi (Windows Video 1 is one example of compression).
Does anyone have experience with this? I have had little luck searching, other than MSDN (which does not clearly handle this particular case).
One route I'm leaning toward is writing a custom Media Foundation Transform to decode using Video For Windows internally, but it seems like I -must- be reinventing the wheel. A sample of something similar can be found here.
Please tell me I'm foolish and show me what I'm missing! Thanks. :)
Related
I always used Adobe Assets for inspect psd - now I found, it's not possible to use this anymore. Do you know about something similar (except Photoshop)?
Have a look at following blog post talking about 'Avocode', it's not a free product. But simular in feature.
Link
Read more about Adobe Extract
Adobe Extract for Brackets got dis-continued. It's better to try something free e.g. https://editor.redaktor.io/
You can extract images, fonts, text, css, etc. Do PSD to HTML development right in your browser.
They have posted a video and a small tutorial here:
https://medium.com/#redaktorio/psd-to-html-editor-in-your-browser-b3116af6af1f
I've just come across the HTTP_PROFILE header that seems to be used by mobile browsers to point to an .xml document describing the device's capabilities.
Doing a Google search doesn't turn up any definitive resources on what this is and how it should be used, can anyone point me to something along the lines of a spec/W3C standard?
I think you may find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAProf to be of interest?
I just found this page: http://www.mobileok.kr/eng/develop2/ddrserver.php
It didn't seem to be authoritative at first glance from the search results, but looks like it might be.
Device Atlas, Wurfl or TeraWurfl are well worth looking into if you want to do some proper mobile device detection. These provide easy access to device properties so you can use content adaptation techniques to serve pages and content which is carefully optimised for the device being used.
Is there a way to get multi-bitrate playback working with progessive playback without having to download all versions of the file? People all coming up with all kinds of cool ways to make progressive feel like streaming. I wouldn't be surprised if there is also a hack for this. Any module names or reading resources that people in the know in this field can recommend?
I have a suggestion, more of a hack really.
I hope you have small clips in mind, otherwise it might get pretty slow for big files.
How about you have audio in a separate file(either flv with no video encoded or just plain mp3) and then your flv.
You load your flv, you play make 'screengrabs' at runtime using BitmapData's draw method and store them in a Vector/Array and that should be it. You can play them back at dynamic speeds,
As for the mp3, you'll next the change the pitch. Andre Michelle has a great article about that.
Is the pricing the issue in not streaming flvs? Red5 is opensource.
Is there any way where i can create a thumbnail image from a flash movie file(flv /swf) [NOT FROM A VIDEO File ] in ASP.NET ? Any samples of implementation ?
you can use ffmpeg to create thumbnails of the flash video
For .flv you can use ffmpeg to convert parts of the video (e.g. one frame) into an image (sequence)
I've used it as command-line application by calling Process.Start(), but there is at least one wrapper for .NET (I haven't tested it myself):
http://www.codeplex.com/ffmpegdotnet
For .swf I don't know any way to achieve this without some Adobe tool.
for flv it can be done easily, as others mentioned ...
for swf, it depends HIGHLY on the swf ... if the swfs visual appearence is determined by code, there is no other way than to embed a flash player in you app and either let the flash player make the snapshots, encode them as JPEG/PNG, and send them somewhere using TCP or LocalConnection (a flash<->flash communication connection, which can be used with C# as well) or try to somehow grab its output buffer yourself ... the first possibility should be no more than 10-20 lines of actionscript code ... don't know about the latter ...
other than that, you might use an external command line converter ... there are a few floating around the web ...
greetz
back2dos
Take a look at this article, it should point you in the right direction. It uses SharpFFmpeg to extract thumbnail images from movie clips from a variety of formats.
the only way to get an image, is to use a full flash client that starts playing and allows you to capture the first frame.
I would take a close look at flirt (they actually have an example that renders pngs)
Maybe some of the other flash libraries may be of help ( swfdec gnash swift tools gplflash)
Gnash is probably the best choice since its the most mature project out there, but i do not know how easy it is to integrate into command line tools or into your own projects.
We have been working on this in my company, and we got a proof of concept working pretty fast (but the project we made it for is on hold right now). I am not able to share the code, but I can give you some pointers.
It is not pure ASP.NET, but maybe you can still use it. We made a windows service that can be called from ASP.NET.
Basicly you install the flash plugin on the server, the windows services can then simply open the swf through the swf ActiveX component and then you can grap a picture of the whole thing. It works pretty well, notice that you do not have to actually render the ActiveX component on screen to capture the picture.
Check out this post. It does not tell you everything but I guess it provides the ground work required for it. You probably have to figure out how to get the object tag out of the flash-html you are trying to download from a web page. After that you'd have to figure out when to capture the frames. Its a long ride however. You don't need the asp.net part. Just concentrate on the windows project part. Hope this helps. :)
Does anyone think it is possible to build a Google Docs style PDF document viewer, which will convert a document to a format that doesn't require Adobe Reader on the client machine?
If so, any references to point to? Either a place that had done it, or an explanation of how to do it.
I've done a lot of research regarding this matter and I hope I can help.
Good old Macromedia used to market Flash Paper, which was supposed to be a PDF Adobe Reader killer as it allowed any webmaster to embed and display PDF docs online using Flash. But that was before they sold out to Adobe and Flash Paper was soon put on a shelf and forgotten in favor of Adobe's priorities.
However, Today there are a so many ground-breaking alternatives...
As a user has mentioned above you can use Scribd.com (the wanna-be YouTube for documents). But they're not the only service (and certainly not the ones most ahead of the curve).
Here are my two favorites:
Issuu (http://www.issuu.com)
Mygazines (http://www.mygazines.com/)
I enjoy Mygazines's flash user interface the most (it's also faster) but it costs $99. It's pretty impressive. Depending on what you want to do that price tag can be worth it.
Issuu however, has won me over recently with their Smartlook Platform: http://issuu.com/smartlook
Here's a sample of Smartlook setup on a website:
http://www.ismartlook.com/
Plus it's completely free, which is nice.
A third alternative, which I've considered using myself is this free and open source code made by this guy named samurajdata. He calls it psview (PostScript Viewer). Anyone can download the source code and see it in action here:
http://view.samurajdata.se/
The converted PDFs losses quality as it converts to image fie, but it's fast and easy to setup.
I hope this helps!
You may try Doconut.com looks pretty same as Google Docs viewer. It is available for asp.net 4.0, apart from PDF it can also show all office formats, tiff, dwg, psd etc.. However it is a paid library.
If I understand you correctly you only want to view these files and not edit them.
Google already makes a best effort at providing PDF files found in it's search results as HTML. This doesn't always work. You can try it out by setting up a gmail account, mailing all your PDF files to it, and then using all the "View attachment as HTML" links in the messages.
Your other options are to take the source material and make it into HTML as say LaTeX2HTML does for LaTeX documents, or to convert the PDF into one of: a raster image (tiff, DjVu, etc), or a vector image (PostScript, SVG, SWF).
If the input to this process starts with the PDF files, you have very limited options, especially if the contents of the PDFs are just raster images (say scanned pages).
Personally I'd advocate for creating the PDFs from their source and trying to use Flash Paper to create an SWF out of them too as Flash Paper will pretend to be a printer. Because some 98% of browsers have Flash 9 or greater.
Have you seen Scribd?
You can just use the Google Docs Viewer which also supports PDF documents. It allows you to embed it in your web page and point to the URL where the PDF is located (which doesn't have to be on the Google servers).
Example:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.domain.com%2Fdocument.pdf
There is the Internet Archive BookReader available. It's a nice book viewer implemented in javascript (jQuery), so the client doesn't need a PDF reader nor Flash. Though it needs images for the book pages, you can easily connect it to your own image server, so you may try to convert a PDF to images via ASP.NET (or any other tool like XPDF). I found that this is simpler to implement than actually implementing an images viewer.
Also, it seems to support search highlighting (try it here), but I haven't investigated exactly which metadata are needed and in what format.
The last release file contains a simple example on how to use it. More details and examples can be found in the first link.
Try converting them from PDF to TIFF. Tiff supports multiple pages and is widely supported.
If formatting isn't that important, and your PDFs are structured right (ie actually contain text, not images of text), an alternate could be to convert to HTML. The tools from Aspose are pretty good.
I'm wondering why you would want to do that. PDF is such a general and widely supported format that if you try to avoid it you're limited to:
A more obscure or less well supported format (dvi, svg until it gets better support)
Converting to text/HTML like Google does with less than perfect results
Converting to an image format like TIFF which bumps up file sizes and removes all the niceties of PDF like real, selectable text and hyperlinks
If you don't want your users to have to install Adobe Reader (understandable), there are many free lightweight PDF viewers available (Foxit Reader for example), I'm sure many of these have browser embedding capabilities.
Am I missing something here? Google Docs DOES support PDF. Simply upload the PDF file.
Some other alternatives depending upon what you're looking to do:
RAD PDF - ASP.NET component for displaying PDF documents, forms, etc. Also allows PDF searching, bookmarks, text selection, and basic editing.
Atalasoft - ASP.NET component for image viewing, but also allows PDF use as an image. Doesn't support any PDF features beyond simple viewing.