| Microsoft DirectX 8.1 (C++) |
This section describes DirectShow features that are new in Microsoft® DirectX 8.1, as well as features that are only available in Microsoft Windows® XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional.
What's New for Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional?
What's New in DirectX 8.1?
See Also
Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional and DirectX 8.0: Microsoft TV Technologies includes support for the new Broadcast Driver Architecture (BDA) and the Microsoft Unified Tuning Model. The Broadcast Driver Architecture defines a framework that supports various component topologies for receiving digital and analog television. It includes software components for network configuration and control, demultiplexing, table parsing and IP Data delivery for the main digital TV standards including DVB and ATSC. The Microsoft Unified Tuning Model is a set of objects that enables applications to easily tune across various network types in a simple and uniform manner.
Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional only: The new Video Control greatly simplifies TV application development and provides Automation support for both digital and analog TV tuners. It supports the new Conditional Access feature available on Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional only. The Guide Store provides easy storage and retrieval of EPG or other information. For more information, see the following topics:
Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional only: The new Video Mixing Renderer Filter greatly improves video playback performance and provides enhanced video features to application developers of television and DVD applications. It also enables new presentation capabilities by enabling video applications to utilize the 3D capabilities in graphics hardware.
Because the Video Mixing Renderer provides different interfaces from the old Video Renderer, some filters that connect upstream of the VMR have been reimplemented in new versions to take advantage of the new interfaces. The following new filters are used only in graphs where the VMR is present: Video Port Manager, Line 21 Decoder 2, WST Decoder 2.
Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional provide a new WDM driver for D-VHS and MPEG camcorder devices, MSTape. DirectShow applications can access these devices through software inferfaces, which communicate to the driver.
The MPEG-2 Demultiplexer now provides support for MPEG-2 transport streams and program streams in both push and pull mode. The MPEG-2 Splitter filter, which previously handled MPEG-2 program streams in pull mode, is deprecated in Microsoft® Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional. For more information, see MPEG-2 Demultiplexer.
DirectX 8.1 provides support for the following Windows® platforms:
Because Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional adds new functionality which is not present on downlevel systems, many of the headers in the \DXSDK\include directory have been revised to allow developers to use this functionality when desired, with full downlevel compatibility. This is achieved by adding the following conditionally compiled sections to the relevant header files:
#if (WINVER >= 0x501)
// Windows XP content
#else
// Downlevel content
#endif
To enable Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional features and to utilize the new portions of the affected headers, set the Windows version to 0x501 (the Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional version) in your Visual C++ project files. If the Windows version is less than 0x501, the original DirectX 8.0 content will be used to allow full backward compatibility with the DirectX 8.0 SDK. Similar improvements were also made to the Interface Definition Files (IDLs) in the \DXSDK\include\DShowIDL directory.
See the Samples\DirectShow and Samples\DirectShow_WinXP directories for more information.
Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional provide new functionality that is not present in downlevel operating systems (Windows 9x, Windows 2000). The DirectShow_WinXP directory provides samples to demonstrate using the new Video Mixing Renderer and the new Microsoft Video Control (for use with the Windows Driver Model and Broadcast Driver Architecture). The new samples include:
See the DirectShow_WinXP directory for more detailed information about these new samples.
In DirectX 8.1, DirectShow adds some great new samples and also incorporates many enhancements and refinements to the existing DirectX 8.0 samples. Improvements to existing samples include:
New samples for DirectX 8.1 include:
The DirectShow documentation has been significantly enhanced for DirectX 8.1. It adds information for the new features available in Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional, and expands on previously presented material for the Microsoft TV Technologies.
There have been several requests for Microsoft to publish the source code for the popular SampleGrabber filter. To that end, we now provide a modified (simpler) version of the sample grabber filter, which uses a new GUID and new CLSID to prevent collisions with the original DirectX 8.0 filter. You can review and modify the source code for this filter and use it in your own applications. See the Filters\Grabber directory for more information.
The DirectX 8.1 binaries and redist files have received various bug fixes since the DirectX 8.0 release, including a large subset of the modifications that were made for Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional.