x264net

.NET wrapper for x264, written in C++/CLI and usable from C# and VB.NET

License

x264net is distributed under the GPL 2.0 license

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

Introduction

x264net is a very simple .NET wrapper for the x264 video encoder. For convenience, pre-built binaries for libx264 are included in the solution. I followed this guide to build x264 in Visual Studio: http://siliconandlithium.blogspot.com/2014/03/building-x264-on-windows-with-visual.html

Requirements

Windows OS. I don't know how to make this cross-platform.

Use Visual Studio 2017 to open and build the solution. The free version is fine.

This wrapper is written in C++/CLI using Visual Studio 2017, so there are dependencies on msvcp140.dll and vcruntime140.dll. Normally this means you must install a Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable package (or Visual Studio itself) on any machine that is going to use this wrapper. However for convenience, I have included the required dll files in the repository and configured the project build events to copy the dll files to the appropriate output directories. Because of this, it should no longer be necessary to install a Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable package.

32 bit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=746571
64 bit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=746572

Usage

When you encode a frame with H.264, the result is one or more "NAL units" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Abstraction_Layer)

X264Net provides two methods for encoding frames. One method returns each NAL unit as a separate byte array. The other returns all NAL units that make up the encoded frame together in one array (in case you don't care about the NAL unit boundaries in your application).

The following C# code demonstrates basic usage of the wrapper. A complete example project is included in the solution.

// You should choose image dimensions that are divisible by 16, if you can.
const int width = 1280;
const int height = 720;
x264net.X264Options options = new x264net.X264Options(width, height);

// Make sure you call Dispose() on the encoder when finished, or use a "using" block like this
using (x264net.X264Net encoder = new x264net.X264Net(options))
{
	// X264Net needs to be fed raw RGB data in the form of a byte array.
	byte[] rgb_data = new byte[width * height * 3];
	
	// ... you could do something here to fill the byte array with image data ...
	
	// Choose one of the encode methods based on your needs:
	
	// If you want to handle each NAL unit separately
	byte[][] NALUnits_Separate = encoder.EncodeFrame(rgb_data);
	
	// If you want just 1 byte array containing 1 or more H.264 NAL units
	byte[] NALUnits_AllTogether = encoder.EncodeFrameAsWholeArray(rgb_data);
}

Advanced Usage

At this time, X264Net is a very simplistic wrapper which provides no encoding options. If (when) you need more control over the encoding parameters, you can easily modify the wrapper to behave differently.