How to implement live video broadcasting in C#?

Question

I want to plug a live video broadcasting facility to a website. I'm planning to use silverlight and C# but I'm very newbie in this topic.

What is the best way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Update:

I have a camera. I want it to capture it and show on my website. Live. But I have no idea about what I must do inside. Tell me everything about the capturing, streams, api's, dll's, whatever else I need to know. Thanks.

Answer 1

If you're on Windows, you may want to consider the free Windows Media Encoder 9 SDK (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/features.aspx). The idea is that Windows Media Encoder allows you to use any device as a media source (say, a video capture card or a streaming-enabled camcorder) and to push it out as an ASF stream, or even to multicast/broadcast it via Windows Media Services.

The WME SDK is simply a programmatic (COM) interface to WME. In principle you can automate the encoder and instruct it to use your camera as a source, and push it out to a specified UDP port or publishing point (for the latter you'll need Windows Server 2003/2008 with Windows Media Services installed).

A newer alternative is Microsoft Expression Encoder SDK (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9A077A3D-58CE-454C-B486-153F0578BE4A&displaylang=en), which "talks" to Expression Encoder and allows you to stream out to Silverlight clients (among others), but the caveat here is that EE is not free (WME is).