DirectShow without the hassle

August 21, 2006 1:37 AM

ProgrammingFilter: Rendering videos to a texture. Like DirectShow, but without it.

I'm building a 3D application with Managed DirectX in C#. I want to render a video to a texture. DirectShow's VMR interface seems to be made for this, and there is a .NET wrapper for DirectShow.

But from what I've heard, the VMR design is severely flawed which makes it hard to implement and more or less impossible if you want to show multiple videos at the same time.

That's why I've thought of using another video library instead of DirectShow. There are plenty, but the problem is that I not only want to show video files, I also want to be able to display live video from a capture device.

Is there any video library besides DirectShow which is able to help me with that?

posted by bloo to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Use bink if you can. It works. It's far better than DirectShow.
posted by sien at 3:19 AM on August 21, 2006

Quicktime definitely does that. Second Life offers the ability to stream videos into any texture in the game, which is often used for 'movie theaters' and the like. It does it via Quicktime.

Beyond that, I know nothing. :)
posted by Malor at 4:05 AM on August 21, 2006

If you can consider dropping C#, you might use a more dedicated video programming environment.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:06 AM on August 21, 2006

WRT Max/Jitter (via Blazecock) - while you certainly CAN build stable, production-worthy apps in Max (see vidvox), i think you'll find that the learning curve and stability issues will send you running for the hills. Any language has a learning curve, but i found the amount of immersion and expertise needed to successfully build a stable (i.e. non-crashing) app in Max far exceeded most "real" programming languages. If you already know C#, stick with that.
posted by casconed at 11:26 AM on August 21, 2006