How to take video snapshot with VLC Web Plugin

Question

I currently need to extract snapshot(s) from an IP Camera using RTSP on a web page.

VLC Web Plugin works well with playing stream, but before I get my hands dirty on playing with its Javascript API, can some one tell me whether the API can help me to take the snapshot(s) of the stream, like the way it done with VLC Media Player, cuz it does not present on the above page.

If the answer is 'No', please give me some other way to do this.

Thanks in advance.

Dang Loi.

Answer 1

The VLC plugin only provides metadata properties accessible from JavaScript.

For this reason there is no way to access the bitmap/video itself as plugins runs sand-boxed in the browser. The only way to obtain such data would be if the plugin itself provided a mechanism for it.

The only way to grab a frame is therefor to use a generic screen snagger (such as SnagIt), of course, without the ability to control it from JavaScript.

You could, as an option, look into the HTML5 Video element to see if you can use your video source with that. In that case you could grab frames, draw them to canvas and from there save it as an image.

Another option in case the original stream format isn't supported, is to transcode it on the fly to a format supported by the browser. Here is one such transcoder .