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:

More info

For more information, Tim Heuer has a great video covering Web cam and microphone support in detail: http://silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/access-web-camera-microphone/