Converting raw frames into webm live stream

Question

I have an ASP.NET application with the following set up:

1. A camera that captures raw RGB frames at a resolution 656x492
2. These frames are processed in my C# code (with some simple image processing)
3. The raw image is stored in a byte array (as well as wrapped in a Bitmap container)
4. MISSING MAGIC: Convert raw image buffer to WebM stream
5. On the other end I have a function HttpResponseMessage function that hooks up a WebM stream with a PushStreamContent function (inspired by this blog post). This function pushes chunks of a video file to the website.
6. A Website that plays back the video.

I am struggling to figure out how to implement point 4. Right now I can only stream video files. But I would like to encode my raw buffer into a WebM container and stream that to my website. The central piece of code of point5 looks as follows:

while (length > 0 && bytesRead > 0)
{
    bytesRead = video.Read(buffer, 0, Math.Min(length, buffer.Length));
    await outputStream.WriteAsync(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
    length -= bytesRead;
}

Basically I would like to replace the video.Read function by somehow encoding my raw frames into a WebM format on the fly and storing them in buffer, so they can be pushed to the website as a live stream. Is there a straight forward way to do this? It's fine if some frames get dropped.

If there is an entirely different approach that is better then I am of course also open for suggestions.

Answer 1

Depending on what you can do on the server (outside of deploying a web app), you might consider writing your buffer into a pipe, then use ffmpeg running in the background to create your stream from it with something like -f rawvideo -pixel_format rgb24 -video_size 656x492 as input parameters.

Answer 2

The WebM Project offers DirectShow filters for playing and encoding WebM

We provide DirectShow filters for playing and working with WebM on Windows. Once the filters are installed on your system, applications that use the DirectShow framework (such as Windows Media Player, and others) will be able to play and encode WebM media

There is also a FFmpegInterop Microsoft initiative which uses the FFmpeg multimedia framework.