title: Creating an MJPEG video stream in c#
body: <p>I have images being sent to my database from a remote video source at about 5 frames per second as JPEG images. I am trying to figure out how to get those images into a video format so I can stream a live video feed to Silverlight.</p>
  
  <p>It seems to make sense to create a MJPEG stream but I'm having a few problems. Firstly I was trying to stream via an HTTP request so I didn't have a deal with sockets but maybe this is breaking my code.</p>
  
  <p>If I try surf to my stream from QT I get a video error, Media player shows the first frame image and Silverlight crashes :)</p>
  
  <p>Here is the code that streams - since I content type used this way can only be sent once I know that it isn't ideal and might be the root cause. All images are coming in via a LINQ2SQL object.</p>
  
  <p>I did already try simply updating the image source of an image control in Silverlight but the flicker isn't acceptable. If Silverlight doesn't support MJPEG then no point even continuing but it looks like it does. I do have access to the h.264 frames coming in but that seemed more complicated via MP4.</p>
  
  <pre><code>    Response.Clear();
      Response.ContentType = "multipart/x-mixed-replace; boundary=--myboundary";
      ASCIIEncoding ae = new ASCIIEncoding();
      HCData data = new HCData();
      var videos = (from v in data.Videos
                   select v).Take(50); // sample the first 50 frames
      foreach (Video frame in videos)
      {
          byte[] boundary = ae.GetBytes("\r\n--myboundary\r\nContent-Type: image/jpeg\r\nContent-Length:" + frame.VideoData.ToArray().Length + "\r\n\r\n");
          var mem = new MemoryStream(boundary);
          mem.WriteTo(Response.OutputStream);
          mem = new MemoryStream(frame.VideoData.ToArray());
          mem.WriteTo(Response.OutputStream);
          Response.Flush();
          Thread.Sleep(200);
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: I have the stream working in firefox so if I surf to the page I see video! but nothing else accepts the format. Not IE, SL, Media player - nothing.</p>