Video Control

This topic applies to Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional only.

The Video Control is a lightweight, efficient ActiveX® control that can be hosted in any ActiveX container, including a Visual Basic® form, a Web page running in Microsoft® Internet Explorer, or a Microsoft PowerPoint® presentation. For the first time, you can write advanced television applications using Visual Basic or script languages.

Using the Video Control, an application can:

• Play analog or digital TV broadcasts.
• Tune to a variety of network types, such as analog, ATSC, or DVB.
• Show or hide closed captioning.
• Enable broadcast IP data services.
• Create sophisticated mixing and blending effects using the Video Mixing Renderer.

These tasks can be done with only a few lines of code. More importantly, this code can be neutral as to the network type. As new network types are supported, the application will automatically support them, without any changes to the application. This is possible because the Guide Store stores all of the necessary tuning information. The application simply retrieves the tune request from the Guide Store and submits it to the Video Control.

• This section contains the following topics:
  • Video Control Overview
  • Tuning with the Video Control
  • Using the Video Control in Script
  • Using the Video Control in Visual Basic
  • Using the Video Control in C++