Here’s some sample code that does this which should hopefully be self-explanatory.

// Create a media item and get a pointer to the inital source.
MediaItem item = new MediaItem(@"c:\users\Public\Videos\Sample Videos\Wildlife.wmv");
Source source = item.Sources[0];

// Change the first clip so that instead of spanning the entire file
// I'm just going to encode the bit from 5 to 10 seconds.
source.Clips[0].StartTime = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 5);
source.Clips[0].EndTime = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 10);

// Also add the bit from 20 to 30 seconds from the original file.
TimeSpan secondClipStart = new TimeSpan(0,0,20);
TimeSpan secondClipEnd = new TimeSpan(0,0,30);
source.Clips.Add(new Clip(secondClipStart, secondClipEnd));

Expression Encoder 3 Visual Basic Samples

You can download them as one zip file by clicking on the Source Code tab and then clicking the Download tab on the right. If you have any problems let me know.

Link

Link

Link

MediaItem item = new MediaItem(@"C:\myvideo.wmv");
item.SourceClips[0].EndTime = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 15);

If I wanted to include the time from 0-15 seconds and from 30-45 seconds of the file I could add the following lines.

TimeSpan timeStart = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 30);
TimeSpan timeEnd = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 45);
item.SourceClips.Add(new SourceClip(timeStart, timeEnd));

You can keep added SourceClip’s for as many sections of the source that you wish to add before calling the Encode method.

MediaItem mediaItem = new MediaItem(@"C:\myvideo.wmv");
int metadataCount = 0;
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> pair in mediaItem.Metadata)
{
    Console.WriteLine(pair.Key + "-" + pair.Value);
}

More frequently you’ll probably want to specify certain metadata before encoding the file. You can do this by doing something like the following before calling the Job’s Encode method

mediaItem.Metadata[MetadataNames.Title] = "My Home Movies";
mediaItem.Metadata[MetadataNames.Author] = "Dean Rowe";

These are using the predefined metadata names that we’ve specified. If you want to specify your own custom metadata you can simply do something like

mediaItem.Metadata["Fred"] = "Foo";

Link

I thought about using Excel to generate the cards or maybe Word but that didn’t look to be as straightforward as I ‘d hope it might be. Then I thought “What about writing a quick WFP app?”. I hadn’t tried printing from WPF first, so I knocked up a quick app to try that out. Once that proved straightforward I just had to write some simple XAML to layout the card, get some halloween clipart from office online and write a little code to load and randomize the images.

So here’s what I ended up with. Each time you run it the app you get a “random” card and every time you click “Print” a new card is generated so you can just keep printing until you have enough cards.

The kids loved it. We gave a few prizes for the kids that got a line first and then we let the kids keeping playing until everybody had filled their card. Note that I deliberately chose to include every image on every card, so everybody filled out their card and shouted “house” at the same time. Of course it would be quite easy to change this behaviour.

If you ever want to do something like this yourself, just launch Visual Studio and create a new WPF application. Here’s what my window1.xaml looked like.

<Window
    xmlns="https://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="https://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    x:Class="UntitledProject4.Window1"
    x:Name="Window"
    Title="Bingo"
    Width="850" Height="900">

    <StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot">
        <Border x:Name="BingoCard" Margin="50,50,0,0" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top" BorderBrush="#FF000000" BorderThickness="5,5,5,5">
            <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding ElementName=Window, Path=Images}" >
                <ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
                    <ItemsPanelTemplate>
                        <WrapPanel />
                    </ItemsPanelTemplate>
                </ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
                <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
                    <DataTemplate>
                        <Border Width="142" Height="142" BorderBrush="#FF000000" BorderThickness="5,5,5,5">
                            <Image Width="Auto" Height="Auto" Source="{Binding Path=FileName}" Margin="10,10,10,10"/>
                        </Border>
                    </DataTemplate>
                </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
            </ItemsControl>
        </Border>
        <Button HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="20,20,0,44" Width="97" Height="30" Content="Print" Click="OnPrint" IsDefault="True"/>
    </StackPanel>
</Window>

and here’s the corresponding C# file.

using System;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;

namespace UntitledProject4
{
    public class ImageData
    {
        public ImageData(string fileName)
        {
            this.FileName = fileName;
        }

        public string FileName { get; set; }    
    }

    public partial class Window1
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The list of images that are databound to.
        /// </summary>
        private ObservableCollection<ImageData> m_images = new ObservableCollection<ImageData>();
        
        /// <summary>
        /// The print dialog. We store it as a member variable so any printer settings are preserved
        /// across multiple prints.
        /// </summary>
        private PrintDialog m_prtDlg = new PrintDialog();

        /// <summary>
        /// Initialize a instance of the Window1 class, that holds a bingo card.
        /// </summary>
        public Window1()
        {
            // Load the images - in this case I'm just loading them from c:\temp\halloween
            for (int i = 1; i <= 25; i++)
            {
                m_images.Add(new ImageData(@"C:\temp\halloween\" + i.ToString() + ".bmp"));
            }

            // Randomize them.
            this.RandomizeImages();

            this.InitializeComponent();
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the collection of images to use for the bingo card.
        /// </summary>
        public ObservableCollection<ImageData> Images
        {
            get
            {
                return m_images;
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Called to print the bingo card. The images are randomized after every print.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="sender">The sender of the event.</param>
        /// <param name="e">The event arguments</param>
        private void OnPrint(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            if (m_prtDlg.ShowDialog() == true)
            {
                m_prtDlg.PrintVisual(this.BingoCard, "Bingo");
            }

            RandomizeImages();
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Randomly shuffle the images
        /// </summary>
        private void RandomizeImages()
        {
            Random random = new Random();
            int imagesCount = m_images.Count;
            for (int i = 0; i < imagesCount; i++)
            {
                int randomIndex = random.Next(0, imagesCount);
                ImageData imageData = m_images[randomIndex];
                m_images[randomIndex] = m_images[i];
                m_images[i] = imageData;
            }
        }
    }
}

Hopefully the code should be self explanatory.