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Decoder Settings for Windows Media Center Edition

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[The feature associated with this page, DirectShow, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine, and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation. Those features have been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation instead of DirectShow, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and later uses the ICodecAPI interface to configure the audio decoder filter for television and DVD playback. The following properties are supported.

Property GUID Description
CODECAPI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_FORMAT Configures the audio output format. See Remarks.

 

Remarks

The value of the CODECAPI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_FORMAT property is a string representation of a GUID, stored as a BSTR value. The following GUIDs are defined.

GUID Description
CODECAPI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_FORMAT_PCM_STEREO_MATRIXENCODED The software audio filter should perform software decoding and output a stereo audio stream, with the multichannel audio matrix encoded to the two channels.
CODECAPI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_FORMAT_PCM_STEREO The software audio filter should perform software decoding and output a stereo audio stream.
CODECAPI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_FORMAT_SPDIF_PCM The software audio filter should perform software audio decoding, even though the physical output from the PC may be a digital interface, such as S/PDIF.
CODECAPI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_FORMAT_SPDIF_BITSTREAM The software audio filter should not perform software audio decoding, but should pass the raw digital audio bitstream for external processing by a device connected with a digital audio link, such as S/PDIF.
CODECAPI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_FORMAT_PCM_HEADPHONES The software audio filter should perform software audio decoding and should apply proprietary processing to optimize for headphones. Support for this setting is optional.

 

Note

The ICodecAPI interface stores codec properties as key/value pairs, where the key is a GUID and the value is a VARIANT type.

 

Encoder and Decoder Development