Showing live television in Flash

[mdeligt]

Hi there!
at the moment I'm building a kiosk-application to show information and advertisments whih is showed at a wide-screen lcs-screen. Since I'm totaly uncapable of using Director I decided to use flash for this. To play dvd-quality video's in 700*500 I skipped flash-video and used Multidmedia Zinc, an application showing existing flash-files and using the wmp, qt or real plugin to show the video's. Till there it's all ok.

But now my customer wants live broadcasted television IN the application (1/2 part of the screen). I played with the hauppauge tv tuner trying to get the tv in windows media player, but no chance. Now I heard that there's the possibility to show the images of a webcam in flash itself, does anyone know if, and if yes, how to connect flash with the tv tuner & the correct channel?

thanx in advance

[CyanBlue]

Howdy and Welcome... :)

I have not much of information on the TV tuner stuff, but I thought that they all use their own software to display the live TV which means that the software requires some sort of custom codec to play it... and I don't think Flash will be able to play that...

That's pretty much of generalized thinking on my end... But please post what you find out if you have more information... ;)

[[Sx]]

That quite much depends on what tuner TV card uses - there are some decoders and tuner controllers (e.g. drivers) that are open-source and in that case all you need is to convert the data stream that it would write to screen into some of flash-acceptable formats, build a server that would broadcast that, and let Flash get the stream off of it...

Of course, that's not as simple as it sounds... As a matter of fact, it would be hellishly hard to produce it that way...

Another solution might be to have tuner's application show it's own window above the Flash player with always-on-top/overlay option (if it doesn't have, it's not hard to program that, at least it's way easier than the first way), and that would be a perfect, easy solution if the TV should have static position (1/2 part of the screen as you've said), and not interact with Flash...

Additionally, second solution can work also even if the TV output wouldn't be static - Flash could control it's position/size/visibility (or even change channels and so if there is an API for that in the TV tuner software) through FSCommand (you can write a set of applications that would define all states of TV tuner window using simple WinAPI interface (I've already explained that in some other thread) and then to call each of those individually when you need to change some of it's options... Or even better, building an socket server to which Flash would connect using XMLSocket and then let it execute functions that Flash needs...

There are few more possible solutions, but it all depends on what exactly do you need with TV output...

[mdeligt]

I depends on the tuner indeed. In the first place I tried to connect windows media player (I can use wmp as a plugin in Multidmedia Zinc) to a stream of the windows media encoder/vlc/star media encoder using the Hauppauge pvr 250 tuner card. A waste of time, only bad pictures in vlc, for the rest errors.

Then I tried an old tunercard from Hauppauge (WinTv 40004 rev) and connected directly with flash! It's selectable in the 'settings' for webcams. The quality isn't hdtv, but I reduced the size to 1/4 screen. It connects easy, first I select a channel in the Hauppauge-software, quit the software and the only thing to do is starting the flash-application.

Now I'm going to figure out how to stream locally to media player, since that will give the best quality.

grt markus

[mdeligt]

oke, some time later.. I found the ocx for the Hauppauge tv tuner card. It's called hcwwintv.ocx (google around), it's also on the disk of some Hauppauge cards. It's easy to use, some samples are given, even watching tv in a html-page. Brilliant quality image and sound.

paz

[heppy]

I'm trying to do something similar! An installation that allows you to watch a satellite feed in the flash application.

So all i need is a tv-tuner that can be seen as a webcam in flash! No?

Have you been able to find out which ones do this? Or why some do or don't?

Then all i have to do is work out how to change the channel from flash!

[iejun]

hi all,

what does the ocx file do ? and can this be done with flash 8 ? have some script but only loads my webcam on my lap...can't see any option where i can select other webcams. :( (or tuner card)