DirectShow vs. Media Foundation for new application
Hi Prakash,
Please could you answer some questions for me? I am evaluating Media Foundation vs. DirectShow for a new application to be written in C#.
The required functionality is:
* Decode a large range of video formats and extract individual frames.
* Insert individual frames and encode a large range of video formats.
I currently achieve this using DirectShow from C++, but I have some difficulty using DirectShow from C#.
1) Is Media Foundation available for me to download and use now? I can only find some very brief documents on the web site, no API reference and no download I can see.
1) Would you recommend Media Foundation for this application? No capture functionality is required. I am hesitant to continue using DirectShow, because there is a large time investment to achieve what I need and it seems to be unsupported and phasing out.
2) Will Media Foundation be supported on Windows XP, or will the application be restricted to Windows Vista?Kind regards,
wtrn
[1068 byte] By [
wtrn] at [2008-2-4]
Media Foundation is available, and you can get it through the Windows SDK at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=13F8E273-F5EA-4B7B-B022-97755838DB94&displaylang=en. You'll get documentation and some code samples with this SDK.
As for whether Media Foundation is appropriate for your application... I think the biggest decision point for you will be format support. Since Media Foundation is v1, it has built-in support for some file formats, such as ASF and MP3, but certainly not everything. Of course, nothing is preventing you from writing your own Media Source, and we even provide a code sample for that; for a simple format, it's not hard, but of course providing a Media Source for complex formats can be a bigger task.
Same story when it comes to decoding and encoding: Vista will have some Media Foundation Transforms (the Media Foundation incarnation of DMOs) -- such as WMA and WMV encoders and decoders -- but, again, not everything. And again, nothing prevents you from writing your own, and if the format is simple, this won't be terribly hard.
Media Foundation is Vista-only; we're not shipping it on XP and below at this time.
Thanks, and good luck...
Becky
