Working with LCIDs

The LCID, or "locale identifer," is a 32-bit data type into which are packed several different values that help to identify a particular geographical region. One of these internal values is the "primary language ID" which identifies the basic language of the region or locale, such as English, Spanish, or Russian.

MSWebDVD requires a complete valid LCID as an input parameter for two methods: SelectDefaultAudioLanguage and SelectDefaultSubpictureLanguage. This can be any valid LCID recognized by Windows®, and even some that are not recognized by Windows. (It is not necessary that the host system actually support the locale with fonts, keyboard mappings, and so on.) The following table lists some common LCIDs as well as well as some less common ones that are valid for MSWebDVD even through Windows does not recognize them by default. This is not a complete list of all possible LCIDs.

Some Valid LCIDs

Several MSWebDVD methods and properties return locale identifier (LCID) values that identify which languages are available on the soundtracks or subtitles. To make use of this information, your application will need to extract the primary language ID from the returned LCID. To do this, perform a bitwise AND operation on the value of iLCID and 0x3FF. (The primary language ID is contained in the least significant 10 bits of the LCID.) The following code snippet shows how to do this.

iPrimaryLang = iLCID & 0x3FF;

To obtain a human-readable string from the primary language ID, call GetLangFromLangID as shown in this example:

sLanguage = DVD.GetLangFromLangID(iPrimaryLang);

See the Microsoft® Platform SDK for more information on LCIDs and language identifiers.

The following table lists the primary language IDs for the LCIDs in the table above.

Some Valid Primary Language IDs