What's New in DirectShow 8.1?

New and Improved 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 features and functionality
• Numerous bug fixes, including Windows XP support issues
• UNICODE and IA64 support
• Clean compilation with Warning Level 4
• Improved video window repainting for Jukebox-style applications
• Updated resource files and version information blocks
• Digital Video sample (Capture\DVApp) was rewritten to take advantage of the ICaptureGraphBuilder2 interface to build its graphs.

New samples for DirectX 8.1 include:

• Audio Capture (Capture\AudioCap)
• DMO-enabled Player (Players\PlayDMO)
• DMO Enumerator (Misc\DMOEnum)
• Filter Mapper (Misc\Mapper)
• Sample Grabber Filter (Filters\Grabber) (modified from DX8 version)
• PlayCap with Moniker (Capture\PlayCapMoniker) (Note: RenderFile moniker support is removed in DirectX 9.0.)
• Still Image Viewer (Players\StillView)
• Utility source code and routines in the DirectShow\Common directory

Updated Documentation

The DirectShow documentation has been significantly enhanced for DirectX 8.1. It adds information for the new features available in Windows XP, and expands on previously presented material for the Microsoft TV Technologies. For Microsoft® Windows® XP Service Pack 1, miscellaneous improvements have been made to video capture and filter development documentation.

Modified SampleGrabber Filter Source Code

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.

Run-Time Improvements

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.

Revised GraphEdit Application

The GraphEdit utility benefits from several improvements, particularly with respect to its user interface, menus, and toolbar. These improvements include:

• Graph resizing code (View->xxx %) handles all sizes correctly, and you can resize your graphs using the menu, keyboard +/- keys, and Ctrl+MouseWheel.
• The option to disable the seek bar (and its timed updates), which has been known to cause difficulty when debugging filters with GraphEdit.
• Better file source filter sizing. To preserve screen real estate, source and file writer filters displayed in GraphEdit will now only display their corresponding filenames as the filter name, instead of displaying the fully qualified path name. For example, a file source for the file C:\DXSDK\samples\Multimedia\Media\lake.mpg" would display "lake.mpg".