DVD-Video API OS Design Development (Windows CE 5.0)

Article
09/14/2012

The DVD-Video API for Microsoft® Windows® CE provides an API that allows DVD playback.

The Windows CE DVD-Video API interfaces provide applications with the same functionality as the stand-alone DVD players familiar to many consumers.

More significantly, the DVD-Video API can be used to provide the DVD playback capabilities for devices that converge other media capabilities such as digital satellite, interactive television, and in-car devices.

OS Design Information

The following table shows operating system design information for the DVD-Video API.

Concept	Description
Dependencies	None.
Hardware considerations	A typical platform designed to play back DVD-Video will have a DVD-ROM drive and a hardware decoder card. These are not strict requirements for the DVD-Video API.

The DVD-Video API is designed to operate in a small memory footprint and with low CPU overhead. It uses high-level rendering interfaces that enable the full functionality of modern multimedia hardware. The DVD-Video API is optimized for hardware-based decoding solutions.

Even though DVD-Video is commonly associated with optical discs, DVD-ROM drives, and dedicated hardware decoding cards, the DVD-Video API does not require any of these physical devices.

As a true middleware Component Object Model (COM) component, the DVD-Video API only requires that specific aspects of DVD-Video functionality be expressed through COM components and their interfaces.

For example, once a DVD-Video volume is abstracted through a COM component, it does not matter to the DVD-Video API whether data from that volume is actually read from an optical disc, a magnetic hard drive, or even a network resource.

The same holds true for DVD-Video decoding. The DVD-Video API only interacts with a COM component so the actual decoding can come from dedicated hardware or from a software solution. Of course, these COM components that interact with the DVD-Video API must meet the technical performance and operability standards that are part of the DVD-Video format.

The DVD-Video API requires the presence of a third party DVD-Video decoding solution on the device. If you are using a hardware decoder on your device then you must obtain the device driver from the decoder manufacturer.