Two camera streams

Question

I'm writing a Metro application that uses the camera extensively. When a user lunches the application for the first time, he is guided through a setup page where the application, among different settings, asks to choose favorite camera, in case the device is equipped with more than one.

Now, when I was designing the camera selection page, I thought about showing a grid where each camera will have a small tile with it's current stream rendered to CaptureElement (through MediaCapture) and that would make it much easier for the user to immediately chose the camera he wants, rather than displaying camera's cryptic model name, or having one camera preview per page.

I ran into a problem while trying to do that. Only one stream is rendered at a time dispite having two different CaptureElements and two different MediaCapture objects initialized to two different camera device ids.

Is this a known limitation of Windows 8 Metro Apps? or I'm missing something?

Thanks!

(Hardware: Samsung Series 7 Tablet)

Answer 1

Hello,
 
Thanks for your feedback, I will involve more experts to investigate it.
 
Best regards,
Jesse

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Jesse Jiang [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 2

Hello Karim,

This is a know limitation of the Windows 8 CP. There is a request in place to allow multiple cameras run in the same application but I honestly don't know if we will see this functionality when the final product ships. I would recommend  that you try instantiating each instance one at a time, taking a picture and then deleting the instance before creating the second instance. While I'm not 100% sure that this will work, given what I know about the MC architecture as long as the instance goes away before the second instance is created you should be fine.

I hope this helps,

James

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Windows Media SDK Technologies - Microsoft Developer Services - http://blogs.msdn.com/mediasdkstuff/

Answer 3

Hello Karim,

I just wanted to follow up with you on this. If you see this issue occur when the next version of Windows 8 ships please respond to this thread. I am trying to keep track of numerous reports like yours.

Thanks,

James

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Windows Media SDK Technologies - Microsoft Developer Services - http://blogs.msdn.com/mediasdkstuff/