Silverlight 4 WebCam – at a glance

WebCam support in Silverlight 4 is a much anticipated feature, and probably didn?t come as much of a surprise. It?s relatively simple to enable this feature. The below example shows a simple UI with the code to enable the webcam. This post does not cover multiple webcams, however calling CaptureDeviceConfiguration.GetAvailableVideoCaptureDevices returns a list of all available webcams.

First create a simple UI (a Rectangle and a Button).

Add an event to the button click event. The logic looks like this:

Get a handle on your video capture device using CaptureDeviceConfiguration.
Request access to the device with CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess().
If the user clicks Yes, then create a CaptureSource object and set the VideoCaptureDevice to the selected webcam.
Create a VideoBrush
Set the Source of the VideoBrush
Start the webcam
Paint the Rectangle (this could be anything that takes a Brush)

Next step, F5 (run your app). You?ll be looking at a blank screen with a button. After clicking the button, a box appears prompting the user to allow access to the webcam and microphone. Click Yes, since after all that is our goal ;).

Voil?!! You are now looking at yourself. Now you can do all sorts of fun web cam stuff. Enjoy.

Tip

After running the above app, I noticed it was backwards. Meaning when I moved left my face on the screen moved to my right. Maybe it?s just me, but my brain was not happy about this. Instead, I wanted the app to respond like a mirror. To do this was a quick fix; simply Flip the Rectangle on the X axis. Here is the menu in Blend to do this: