DirectShow Development
Although we work with most modern technologies and tools, we’ve a particular interest
in media technologies such as DirectShow and Windows Media.
For 5 years (2002 – 20007) Iain Downs was one of half a dozen Microsoft DirectShow/Media
Foundation Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs)
across the world. This is an award Microsoft gives to professionals it recognises for both
their technical and their communication skills.
He's been doing DirectShow development and working with Windows Media since 2001.
With DirectShow, Windows Media and other technologies we’ve developed a number of video and audio
capture, encoding, processing and delivery systems.
These developments have included :-
- Capture, encoding, recording and upload of sporting events using DirectShow
- Conversion of content to various formats (MPEG2, MP4, WMV, MP3 and others) developed with DirectShow, Windows Media and a variety of 3rd party encoders and decoders.
- Environment simulation with multiple speed video for exercise machines developed with DirectShow.
- ‘Real time’ production of custom DVD and CDs from various media using very low level access to the media
- DirectShow development for Medical instrumentation
- 3D visual output using Direct3D
- Perlego: Identification of playing cards from face and back using machine vision
and ‘invisible’ bar codes for live Poker broadcast and commentary using OpenCV and proprietory recognition algorithms
DirectShow is a technology developed by Microsoft which models processing of video, audio or other signals as a flow of data (samples) through a series of processing nodes called 'Filters'.
Filters may be 'source' or 'destination' filters which are generally the start and end point of media within the graph (e.g. a file or streaming service for source filters and a video or audio renderer or file for destination filters).
Or they may be 'normal' filters which process the signals (compression/decompression, colour or pitch change, mixing, splitting and many others).
Each filter exposes 'pins' through which samples can arrive or depart. Most filters have one input and one output pin, but some have no output pins (renderers), some have multiple input pins (mixers) and other combinations!
Although simple in concept, DirectShow development has a (deserved!) reputation for having a steep learning curve for developers, especially the development of filters which can have complex threading and timing issues.
Contact us if you have a need for DirectShow development or any other media processing applications.