Introduction to DirectShow Editing Services

[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine, and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation.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.]

[This API is not supported and may be altered or unavailable in the future.]

The core of DirectShow is a powerful architecture for handling streaming media. An application can use it to play multimedia content authored in a wide variety of formats, without the developer needing to worry about file compression and other tedious details. Prior to DirectShow Editing Services (DES), however, DirectShow lacked the flexibility needed for nonlinear editing.

For example, suppose you wanted to create a video sequence consisting of 4 seconds from source A, followed by 10 seconds from source B, and ending with 5 seconds from source C. You could accomplish that much fairly easily using only the core DirectShow API.

But what if you decided that source C should come before source B, not after; that the sequence should use 8 seconds from source A, not 4; and that the entire production needed a separate audio track playing in the background? Even minor changes such as these could be difficult to implement. But the scenario just described is a trivial editing project in DES—you can do it with a handful of method calls.

Here are some of the features that DES brings to DirectShow:

  • A timeline model that organizes video and audio tracks into nested layers, making it easy to manipulate the final production
  • The ability to preview a video project on the fly
  • Project persistence through an XML-based format
  • Support for video and audio effects, as well as transitions between video tracks (such as fades and wipes)
  • Over 100 standard wipes, as defined by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE)
  • Keying based on hue, luminance, RGB value, or alpha value
  • Automatic conversion of frame rates and audio sampling rates, enabling a production to use heterogeneous sources
  • Resizing or cropping of video

Limitations:

  • DES does not support MPEG-2 or H.264 video sources.

DirectShow Editing Services