Video starter kit Articles

After more than one year with thousands of improvements, fixes and design modification atlast we released asp.net video starter kit version 8.0 today. This version targets same core features but refined from every aspect.

Design Improvements:

• Introduced lighter, latest bootstrap 3.20 compatible control panel and front themes.
• Replacement of app_themes folder with direct css usage to make it faster and use theme style sheets more efficiently.
• Refined complete project user interface with bootstrap 3.20 compatible interface to make look and feel and html layout more cleaner.
• More refined and responsive listings and image display.
• and more

Video Streaming Improvements:

• Introducing advance http script to progressively stream videos via html5 / flash player.
• Introducing advance token & cookie based http stream protection.
• Improved http streaming of private distribution over cloud front (RTMP and HLS)
• Use of latest JW Player and MediaElement5 Player

Video Uploading & Publishing:

• More improved uploader with encoding system.
• Introducing direct video uploader which allow site administrator to upload multiple mp4 / webm etc published videos, capture thumb via HTML 5 screenshot taker, and capture duration of videos directly.
• Improved audio uploading

Restructured Control Panel:

• Complete redesigned control panel with enhanced management.
• Responsive bootstrap 3.2 compatible admin control panel template.
• More than 200 features in control panel that can control every aspect of website settings and user posted data.

Improved All Core Sections:

• Improved almost all core sections including
• Feature improvments of videos, audio, qa, forums, blogs and groups.
• Improved displaying, listing and processing of data
• Content posting structured are completely redesigned and more secured.

Data Access Layer:

• Make data process layer more improved, scalable and secure.
• Extended data access layer by introducing NHibernate and Entity Framework 6.0 (both nhibernate, entity framework) is in testing mode and not yet part of bundle

My Account:

• Redesigned and improved control panel features
• Retuned allmost all features (more than 100) avaialble in myaccount section.

User Channel:

• Removed heavy loaded, classical style custom channels.
• Make all feature tunned and lighter

Other Enhancement:

• Using latest tinymice rich text box editor for posting contents through admin or user.
• Improved way to use pretify js script to make code display in blogs, forums, qa and other part of site more beautiful
• Improved wiki / article posting section (http://www.mediasoftpro.com/glossary/)
• Improved website design with enhanced footer.
• Add optional theme switcher on top.
• Update all features using latest jquery, bootstrap and other js files.
• Improved album listings and previews.
• Improved photo listing and previews.
• Introducing advance image resizer / options to resize, download photos based on various optiosn (hd, wide screen, mobile compatible and more)
• and hundreds of more improvemends.

As ASP.NET Video Starter Kit is built from more than 20 core sections which including upto 1000 features. There may be chances of small bugs, fixes, if you found it, just report it to us via our support forum or mail.

Uploading and encoding videos and audio files from almost every video and audio format, generate highest possible quality output and make it streamable for the web is one of the most complex in web development effort. From first release 2007 we contineously working hard in highest priority on this areas and contineously improving our script to make this process fast, reliable, scalable and provide best possible results.

Until current release of video starter kit 7.1, we face tremendeous amount of challenges including.

• Introducing new video formats and streaming concepts time to time starting journey from flash flv encoding and streaming now extended to diverse mp4, webm, m3u8 and other streaming formats with diverse approaches. 
• Popularity of mobiles devices add more challenges for adopting strategies for better streaming approaches (html5, flash etc)
• Time to time introducing rich user interfaces, jquery and other uploading file approaches.
• Starting from ftp and now cloud storage and streaming become much popular source for media stoage on multiple servers.
• And lots of other challenges time to time.

We continously working hard to tackle these challenges while introducing concepts which support almost every current standards. We sometime face tough time as addition of feature cause unstability in our product encoding phases.

Recent Changes:

In order to make it more stable and reliable we made some restrictions and addition of new features in current encoding script.

Addition includes

Today we released more stable and improved version of asp.net video starter kit 7.1 which is a core product of all sub products (videos, audio, photos, forums, blogs, qa, groups etc).

In this release we mainly focussed on stabilizing all advance features added in version 7.0 and make it more lighter and scalable. List of main improvements done in version 7.1

• Improved video and audio publishing logic to make it more stable, reliable and fix bugs found in previous version.
• Upgrade twitter bootstrap with latest version.
• Fix browse issues found while implementing twitter bootstrap.
• Facebook wallpaper style user profile with ability for users to post on their own walls (internal contents and external link share like facebook). Can be easily extended to allow friends to post on your wall or profile.
• Improved video and audio uploading by allowing chunk uploads.
• Background video and audio encoding introduced.
• Improved script for sheduled video and audio processing.
• Removed ftp uploading (classic style) content management while extending focus completely on cloud storage and streaming.
• Removed other useless features.
• Clean and made code lighter.
• First time after six years of first release, we released free version of asp.net video kit lighter edition.
• And hundreds of more features and fix.

We appreciate your feedbacks and bug reports. This help us to improve our product more.

We just released free version of asp.net video sharing & youtube clone script today under open source LGPL license.

It is a complete script with all basic and advance features which allow you to created highly profitable social media sharing web site in asp.net.

You can download free version from https://aspnetyoutubeclone.codeplex.com/

It includes almost all features available in pro version with some advance feature limitations. you can see detail about these limitation on http://www.mediasoftpro.com/video-sharing-script.html

For help and discussion you can use the following forum.

http://www.mediasoftpro.com/forum/39/asp.net-video-starter-kit-amp-youtube-clone.aspx

We can provide additional installation service by one time fees.

We appreciate your feedbacks for releasing more free products soon.

You can get more free scription from http://www.mediasoftpro.com/aspnet-free-scripts/

ASP.NET Video Starter Kit 7.0 completely replaced video or audio publishing script with more reliable and advance encoding script based on newly developed video uploader and publisher engine.

New media encoding script allow you to set multi format (flv, mp4, webm, ogv), multi level (360p, 480p, 720p) youtube style video publishing mechanism by setting different settings within single encoding setting file.

Now you can easily setup your encoding routine to process source video to variety of ways including

• convert source video to mp4 format,
• convert source video to mp4, mp3 audio format.
• convert source video to mp4, webm format
• convert source video to mp4 (360p), mp4 (480p) format
• convert source video to mp4 (360p), webm (480p) format
• and more with your own way.

Now media settings can't be updated from control panel -> settings -> configuration -> media section, still you can set video extensions, etc from here. Now you can set different levelvideo encoding and settings via separate file. example shown below.

 public static MediaHandler ReturnMediaSettings(int itag)
 {
     MediaHandler media = new MediaHandler();
     string RootPath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(HttpContext.Current.Request.ApplicationPath);
     string presetpath = RootPath + "\\ffmpeg\\presets\\libx264-baseline.ffpreset";
     switch (itag)
     {
             case 0: // 240p flv video settings
                     media.Width = 400;
                     media.Height = 240;
                     media.Video_Bitrate = 256;
                     media.Audio_SamplingRate = 22050;
                     media.Audio_Bitrate = 64;
                     media.OutputExtension = ".flv";
                     media.Force = "flv";
                     break;
             case 1: // 360p flv video settings
                     media.Width = 640;
                     media.Height = 360;
                     media.Video_Bitrate = 500;
                     media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
                     media.Audio_Bitrate = 128;
                     media.OutputExtension = ".flv";
                     media.VCodec = "libx264";
                     media.Parameters = " -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
                     break;
             case 2: // 480p flv video settings
                     media.Width = 854;
                     media.Height = 480;
                     media.Video_Bitrate = 1000;
                     media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
                     media.Audio_Bitrate = 128;
                     media.OutputExtension = ".flv";
                     media.VCodec = "libx264";
                     media.Parameters = " -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
                     break;
              case 3: // 720p flv video settings
                    media.Width = 1280;
                    media.Height = 720;
                    media.Video_Bitrate = 2000;
                    media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
                    media.Audio_Bitrate = 128;
                    media.OutputExtension = ".flv";
                    media.VCodec = "libx264";
                    media.Parameters = " -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
                    break;
               case 4: // 240p mp4 video encoding
                    media.Width = 400;
                    media.Height = 240;
                    media.Video_Bitrate = 256;
                    media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
                    media.Audio_Bitrate = 128;
                    media.OutputExtension = ".mp4";
                    media.VCodec = "libx264";
                    media.Parameters = " -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
                    break;
              case 5: // 360p mp4 video encoding
                    media.Width = 640;
                    media.Height = 380;
                    media.Video_Bitrate = 500;
                    media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
                    media.Audio_Bitrate = 128;
                    media.OutputExtension = ".mp4";
                    media.VCodec = "libx264";
                    media.Parameters = " -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
                    break;
              case 6: // 480p mp4 video encoding
                    media.Width = 854;
                    media.Height = 480;
                    media.Video_Bitrate = 1000;
                    media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
                    media.Audio_Bitrate = 128;
                    media.OutputExtension = ".mp4";
                    media.VCodec = "libx264";
                    media.Parameters = " -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
                   break;
              case 7: // 720p mp4 video encoding
                   media.Width = 1280;
                   media.Height = 720;
 media.Video_Bitrate = 2200;
 media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
 media.Audio_Bitrate = 96;
 media.OutputExtension = ".mp4";
 media.VCodec = "libx264";
 media.Parameters = " -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
 break;
 case 8: // 1080p mp4 video encoding
 media.Width = 1920;
 media.Height = 1080;
 media.Video_Bitrate = 2900;
 media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
 media.Audio_Bitrate = 152;
 media.OutputExtension = ".mp4";
 media.VCodec = "libx264";
 media.Parameters = " -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
 break;
 case 9: // 240p webm video encoding
 media.Width = 400;
 media.Height = 240;
 media.Video_Bitrate = 256;
 media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
 media.Audio_Bitrate = 128;
 media.OutputExtension = ".webm";
 media.VCodec = "libx264";
 presetpath = RootPath + "\\ffmpeg\\presets\\libvpx-360p.ffpreset";
 media.VCodec = "libvpx";
 media.ACodec = "libvorbis";
 media.Parameters = "-f webm -aspect 4:3 -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
 break;
 case 10: // 360p webm video encoding
 media.Width = 640;
 media.Height = 380;
 media.Video_Bitrate = 500;
 media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
 media.Audio_Bitrate = 128;
 media.OutputExtension = ".webm";
 media.VCodec = "libx264";
 presetpath = RootPath + "\\ffmpeg\\presets\\libvpx-360p.ffpreset";
 media.VCodec = "libvpx";
 media.ACodec = "libvorbis";
 media.Parameters = "-f webm -aspect 4:3 -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
 break;
 case 11: // 480p webm video encoding
 media.Width = 854;
 media.Height = 480;
 media.Video_Bitrate = 1000;
 media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
 media.Audio_Bitrate = 192;
 media.OutputExtension = ".webm";
 media.VCodec = "libx264";
 presetpath = RootPath + "\\ffmpeg\\presets\\libvpx-360p.ffpreset";
 media.VCodec = "libvpx";
 media.ACodec = "libvorbis";
 media.Parameters = "-f webm -aspect 4:3 -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
 break;
 case 12: // 720p webm video encoding
 media.Width = 1280;
 media.Height = 720;
 media.Video_Bitrate = 2200;
 media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
 media.Audio_Bitrate = 192;
 media.OutputExtension = ".webm";
 media.VCodec = "libx264";
 presetpath = RootPath + "\\ffmpeg\\presets\\libvpx-360p.ffpreset";
 media.VCodec = "libvpx";
 media.ACodec = "libvorbis";
 media.Parameters = "-f webm -aspect 4:3 -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
 break;
 case 13: // 1080p webm video encoding
 media.Width = 1920;
 media.Height = 1080;
 media.Video_Bitrate = 2900;
 media.Audio_SamplingRate = 44100;
 media.Audio_Bitrate = 192;
 media.OutputExtension = ".webm";
 media.VCodec = "libx264";
 presetpath = RootPath + "\\ffmpeg\\presets\\libvpx-360p.ffpreset";
 media.VCodec = "libvpx";
 media.ACodec = "libvorbis";
 media.Parameters = "-f webm -aspect 4:3 -fpre \"" + presetpath + "\"";
 break;
 case 14: // mp3 audio encoding
 media.DisableVideo = true;
 media.Channel = 2;
 media.Audio_SamplingRate = 4800;
 media.Audio_Bitrate = 192;
 media.OutputExtension = ".mp3";
 break;
 }
 return media;
 }

You can add more options and update existing options based on your encoding settings.

How to enable encoding based on your selected settings?

You can just pass setting id as string or array list to media encoder class which is responsible for publishing videos. e.g if you want to allow script to encode 360p mp4 encoding, just add the following script in video uploader file.

ArrayList itags = new ArrayList();
itags.Add("5");encoder.iTags = itags;

e.g if you want to encode 360p mp4 video and mp3 audio file for listing audio as alternative source. do the following settings.

ArrayList itags = new ArrayList();
itags.Add("5");itags.Add("14");encoder.iTags = itags;

Once updated, rest of videos will be published based on your settings.

You can enable cloud storage to store published videos and audio files to cloud (builtin amazon s3 supported), you need to setup, enable cloud storage from control panel -> settings -> configurations -> cloud setting section  inorder to perform storage properly.

encoder.EnableCloudStorage = true;

You can delete source video after publishing by using the followng setting

 encoder.DeleteSource = true;

Hope this guide will help you to implement best possible approach for encoding high quality videos and audio files  via asp.net video starter kit 7.0 applicatioin.

ASP.NET Photo or Image Crawler Script is buitin part of asp.net video starter kit or asp.net photo sharing script, which is small image crawler script allow you to fetch images from any third party websites, download images, prepare images (generate mid or small thumbs), store images on your server or cloud storage, create photo albums and create blog posts from generated photos automatically in one step.

Main Features:

• Crawl and fetch photos from almost every type of website or page which include photos.
• Allow option to create new album or add fetched photos in existing album
• Allow option to create blog post from list of fetched photos.
• Allow options to choose category, tags and other information for fetched photos, albums and blog posts.
• Allow options to review and select best fetched photos and delete remaining.
• Allow options to globally set photo caption or individually update photo title, tags, categories, description.

Script can be more extended to crawl and fetch photos from whole website. It can be extended to generate image search engine for crawling complete websites, fetch photo information, generate thumbs and store photo index information to allow users to search indexed photos.

It allows flexibility to add hundreds of thousands of photos within few days which normally takes months or years of effort.

Script can be used for lots more purposes.

Demo on Youtube

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Recommended to use such crawler for fetching normal, non copyright or your own materials.

ASP.NET Video Starter Kit introduced advance facebook style groups and community management script which allows developer to build their own professional community portal or integrate community feature in existing asp.net website.

It include all features required to build professional facebook style complete community or group portal.

There are hundreds of feature available, main feature includes

• Allow users to create group and manage groups.
• Allow users to manage group contents.
• Allow users to invite other members.
• Join or leave groups.
• Search within group contents.
• Professional facebook style content sharing within group.
• Allow flexibility to add almost every type of content within group.
• Allow administrators to manage all groups, group members and contents.
• Advance mail communication between group members, authors and admins.
• and lots of more features.

For more detail visit group detail section. http://www.mediasoftpro.com/asp.net-group-portal.html

Watch Facebook Style Content Sharing Demo on Youtube.

ASP.NET Video Starter Kit 7.0 introduced advance professional photo uploader with ability to upload multiple photos at once, generate medium thumb, small thumb for different previews, store photos on local or cloud storage and photo information in database and generate professional photo album preview.

List of core features available in asp.net video starter kit 7.0 photo uploader.

• Support upload multiple photos at once.
• Generate mid thumb and small thumb for blog or listing preview.
• Store photos locally or on cloud storage, amazon s3 builtin supported.
• Allow updating muliple photo information in facebook style.
• Allow creating album, storing photos in new album or existing albums.
• Allow uploading photos to groups.
• Allow generating facebook style photo uploading activity.
• And lots more.

Video Demo

ASP.NET Video Starter Kit 7.0 introduced advance video uploader which is more faster, lighter, reliable and have ability to process multiple videos at once. 

The following core features available in new video uploader.

• Completely rewritten from scratch to upload and publish videos more fastly and reliably.
• Use newly written professional video processing, thumb grabbing and information parsing script with ability to support multi format (mp4, wmv, flv, webm, ogv, mp3 etc), multi level (360p, 480p etc) publishing at once from single video. more detail
• Support storing videos locally or on cloud storage. Builtin support for amazone s3.
• Support streaming videos directly from cloud, builtin support for amazon cloudfront streaming (adobe flash streaming server supported)
• Support ability to grab multiple thumbs from single video.
• Support upading information of multiple uploaded video in facebook, youtube style.
• Support creating albums and upload videos in newly created album or existing album.
• Support uploading videos to groups directly.
• Generate professional video uploading facebook style activity post. display in user public profile.
• and lots of more features.

Youtube Video Preview.

We just released asp.net video starter kit after more than year of effort to make it lighter, faster and more scalable.

We have added lots of new features, addition of new core sections and added hundreds of improvements in almost every section, module or features within asp.net video starter kit solution. 

It is now fully compatible with next generation user interface development tools (Jquery + Twitter Bootstrap)

For more information, visit http://www.mediasoftpro.com/video-starter-kit/7.0/whats-new.html

ASP.NET Video Starter Kit support both google sitemap and yahoo ror sitemap generator and yahoo ror sitemap generator for posting dynamic content listing urls to google, yahoo, bing and other search engines.

These sitemaps helps your website contents to be fastly crawled and index by google, yahoo, bing and other search engines and in result with organic visitors increase (visitors comes through search results)

List of sitemaps supported by asp.net video starter kit 6.0

•  Category Urls (for submitting category urls to search engines)
• Tag Urls (for submitting tag cloud urls to search engines)
• Video & Audio Urls ( for submitting videos and audio file urls to search engines)
• Photo Urls (for submitting photo urls to search engines)
• Gallery Urls (for submitting gallery urls)
• Blog Urls (for submitting blog urls)
• Forum Urls (for submiting forum urls)
• Forum Topic Urls (for submitting forum topic urls)

Both Google and Yahoo sitemaps supported for content types mentioned above.

All sitemap files located at /sitemaps/ folder.

You can register these sitemaps through webmaster tools e.g Google Webmaster Tool, Yahoo Webmaster Tool, etc

Each sitemap can generate upto 50,000 Urls (maximum restriction of search engines), if your website records exceeds 50,000 records for specific section e.g videos you can generate another sitemap for next 50,000 records by passing pagenumber.

You can submit different types of content sitemap by using "type" querystring e.g

• category_urls.asxh?type=0 // represent video categories
• category_urls.asxh?type=1 // represent photo categories