About Multimedia Device Drivers

Windows provides low-level services for multimedia applications. Applications use these services to control multimedia devices such as synthesizers, waveform-audio hardware, and video-capture cards.

This topic explains the Microsoft Windows interface for multimedia drivers, including the following topics:

• Information about a variety of audio and video devices
• General techniques for writing multimedia device drivers
• When appropriate, specific information about writing device drivers for particular devices

This topic is an overview that relates to multimedia device drivers in general. Other parts of this help file provide specific information about writing drivers for individual multimedia devices.

• Audio Device Drivers describes support for waveform input and output devices, MIDI input and output and MIDI synthesizer devices, and mixer devices.
• MCI Device Drivers describes a generic, extensible approach for interacting with different multimedia devices. This chapter also describes how to develop drivers that use the standard features of MCI and how to extend MCI to provide access to new devices and new device features.
• Video Capture Device Drivers describes support for video capture devices.
• Joystick Device Drivers describes support for joystick devices.
• Audio Compression Manager Drivers describes how to write audio compression and decompression (codec) drivers.
• Video Compression and Decompression Drivers describes how to write video compression and decompression (codec) drivers.

• describes the applications for testing different types of drivers. These applications use a common shell that automates tests and lets testers manage the test suite without writing and editing batch files. This chapter describes the test shell and the test applications.

Before using the information in this topic , you should be familiar with the basic multimedia services available in Windows and with the Windows installable-driver interface. For information about these topics, see the Microsoft Windows Programmer's Reference.