DirectShow Readme

Welcome to the DirectShow SDK

© 1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of use.

This document provides late-breaking or other information that supplements the Microsoft DirectShow documentation.

Overview

New Since DirectShow 5.1

New Since ActiveMovie 1.0

Building the Samples

Known Issues and Troubleshooting

Contact Information

Capture Hardware Tested with this Release


Overview

To get started with the DirectShow SDK, please do the following:

Read Getting Started section of the Microsoft DirectShow SDK documentation.

Read the NEW SINCE DirectShow 5.1 section of this Readme.

Read the license information.

Licensing information is located in the license.doc in the root of the CD, and eula.doc in the x86\redist and alpha\redist directories.

DirectShow will fully replace MCI functionality over time, but that functionality is not completely implemented yet. In addition, Visual Basic support for some properties of the ActiveMovie control is not yet complete, which might result in some restricted functionality. A detailed list of the known limitations can be found in Microsoft's on-line Knowledge Base (http://www.microsoft.com/kb), searching the Win32 SDK database for article number Q157060.

The DirectShow team welcomes any feedback regarding bugs or restrictions so that problems can be rectified as soon as possible. Please direct your feedback via e-mail to dxmbeta@microsoft.com.

For the latest on DirectShow, check out Microsoft's on-line Knowledge Base (http://www.microsoft.com/kb). Search the Win32 SDK product for keywords such as ActiveMovie, DirectShow and kbmm.

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New Since DirectShow 5.1

The DirectX Media 5.2b run time has improvements in two specific areas - DVD Playback and WDM Capture support.

For DVD playback, the run time provides support for PAL DVD discs as well as improved interactive responsiveness. The run time has also been tested with many new DVD titles that were released in the last two months.

The Overlay Mixer, which is a key rendering component for DVD playback, has been improved in the following areas.

The video and audio capture infrastructure has been enhanced to add support for more types of WDM streaming class capture hardware running under Microsoft® Windows® 98 or Windows NT® 5.0. If your application is going to work with this new hardware, you should re-read the capture interface descriptions and re-read the code for our sample capture application, Amcap.exe found in the Capture sample directory.

In addition, a new video control interface has been added, IAMVideoControl, that enables you to flip a picture horizontally and/or vertically, to set up a stream so that it can capture from an external trigger, to simulate an external trigger in software, and to list the current frame rate, maximum frame rate, and available frame rates.

A new filter, Smart Tee, has been added to aid preview on capture filters that only have a capture pin and not a preview pin.

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New Since ActiveMovie 1.0

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Building the Samples

To build the DirectShow SDK samples, you must install Microsoft Visual C++ version 5.0. The header files and libraries from the DirectShow SDK are also required.

To build all the samples, run nmake in the \samples\dshow directory. Debug versions will be built by default. To produce non-debug versions set the 'nodebug' environment variable (that is, set nodebug=1), or type nmake NODEBUG=1.

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Known Issues and Troubleshooting

The following is a list of current problems. Some of them have already been fixed; those fixes will appear in upcoming releases.

General

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Contact Information

Development questions, feature requests, and business opportunities for those developing tools or content based on DirectShow should be addressed to: dxmbeta@microsoft.com.

Bugs should be reported to dxmbug@microsoft.com

DirectShow has created public news groups on the Microsoft Public News Server, as a forum for the DirectX media user community. You are encouraged to post questions on the appropriate news group:

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Capture Hardware Tested with this Release

The following capture hardware has been successfully tested in this release using the DirectShow audio and video capture filters (as appropriate):

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