concept webcam in category silverlight
This is an excerpt from Manning's book Silverlight 4 in Action: Silverlight 4, MVVM, and WCF RIA Services.
Silverlight primarily is a subset of WPF with some additions. Some of the additions, such as the Visual State Manager, have been migrated back from Silverlight into WPF. Others, such as Deep Zoom, Media Stream Source, and the webcam and microphone APIs, are currently Silverlight-only features. Ignoring alternative solutions to the same problems, figure 1.1 shows this relationship using our friend, the Venn diagram.
Silverlight allows the user to set the default webcam and default microphone. This is done by right-clicking on any Silverlight application and selecting the Silverlight menu option. Alternatively, the user can open Microsoft Silverlight from his program shortcuts. Once there, select the Webcam/Mic tab and pick from the list of available options. You’ll see a preview of the webcam to the left and an audio level meter for the microphone on the right. Figure 20.10 shows the configuration dialog.
Figure 20.10. Silverlight default webcam and microphone tab in the Silverlight settings dialog. Either that image is horizontally stretched in an unflattering way, or I need to lay off the chips.
The settings start out using default capture devices on your machine. You can change it from there. The changes will globally affect all Silverlight applications that use the webcam or microphone.
In this section, we’ll first cover how to gain access to the webcam and microphone in Silverlight. Then we’ll examine how to work with the default webcam and microphones for the platform, including how to capture video and still images. Then, because most machines have more than one audio capture device, and some even more than one video capture device, we’ll look at what’s required to allow the user to select a specific webcam or microphone.