Working way to make video from images in C#

Question

Does anybody have a known reliable way to create a video from a series of image files? Before you mod me down for not searching for the answer before posting the question,

Answer 1

The handling of video on Windows (encoding and playback) is a real quagmire. And .NET isn't going to help you at all - you're always going to be either PInvoking/COM-interoping native APIs or using a .NET wrapper that someone else has built to do the same.

Anyway, I can't say I've used it, but a good bet seems to be the x264 library that is part of the videolan project. That gives you a self-contained C library that you can PInvoke and you don't have to worry about installing and DirectShow garbage on your server. It'll generate H.264 format video which is playable in Flash as I understand it.

Answer 2

Instead of just going through all the hassle, you could coppy all the images that you want to be included in your video to the clipboard and have it imported into Windows Live Movie Maker (dynamically, of course!) and have it compile for you!

All of this CAN be done through code, but this way, you don't have to create it yourself. As you said that the platform was Windows, and ALL Windows comps have Windows Live Movie Maker installed, so it shouldn't be a problem for anyone using your application unless

a) They uninstalled Windows Live Movie Maker

b) They are using a computer running on a Windows Version more than 8 or 9 years old...

Answer 3

You can use VideoLan and I'd recommend it.

I've had direct experience in a C# application with VideoLan doing these two things:

1. Embedding a VLC viewer in my C# application (there are 3-4 C# "wrappers" for the VLC veiwer).
2. Using vlc.exe in a separate Process by sending it command-line arguments.

The fact that VideoLan has a command-line interface is a great thing. And VLC supports a command-line option that disables any visual element; so the VLC GUI doesn't pop up and neither does a command-line window. Thus, in a C# application you can farm out the video-related work to the VLC client. C# has the Process class which can manage your vlc.exe instances for you. It ends up being a pretty neat solution.

Answer 4

I've used mplayer's mencoder to create AVI (with codecs msmpeg4/mp3, readable by default with Windows Media Player) from TGA files on linux like this:

mencoder mf://*.tga -mf fps=25:type=tga \
  -audiofile /tmp/test.mp3 -oac copy \
  -of lavf -ovc lavc \          
  -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:mbd=2:mv0:trell:cbp:last_pred=3:vbitrate=3000 \
  -o /tmp/test.avi

I know mplayer does have a Windows version.

Answer 5

After working with it a while and taking a look at x264 and VideoLan, I went back to Splicer. It turns out that the cryptic error message was due to an error in my code.

It looks like Splicer will do what I want: programmatically create videos from a series of images.

Thanks to all who responded.