Boss handed me a bit of a challenge that is a bit out of my usual ballpark and I am having trouble identifying which technologies/projects I should use. (I don't mind, I asked for something 'new' :)
Job: Build a .NET server-side process that can pick up a bitmap from a buffer 10 times per second and produce/serve a 10fps video stream for display in a modern HTML5 enabled browser.
What Lego blocks should I be looking for here?
Dave
You'll want to use FFmpeg. Here's the basic flow:
If you're streaming in these images, probably the easiest thing to do is decode the bitmap into a raw RGB or RGBA bitmap, and then write each frame to FFmpeg's STDIN. You will have to read the first bitmap first to determine the size and color information, then execute the FFmpeg child process with the correct parameters. When you're done, close the pipe and FFmpeg will finish up your output file. If you want, you can even redirect FFmpeg's STDOUT to somewhere like blob storage on S3 or something.
If all the images are uploaded at once and then you create the video, it's even easier. Just make a list of the files in-order and execute FFmpeg. When FFmpeg is done, you should have a video.
One additional bit of information that will help you understand how to build an FFmpeg command line: WebM is a container format. It doesn't do anything but keep track of how many video streams, how many audio streams, what codecs to use for those streams, subtitle streams, metadata (like thumbnail images), etc. WebM is basically Matroska (
.mkv), but with some features disabled to make adopting the WebM standard easier for browser makers. Inside WebM, you'll want at least one video stream. VP8 and VP9 are very compatible codecs. If you want to add audio, Opus is a standard codec you can use.Some resources to get you started: