Quality-Control Management

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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine, and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation.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

Quality control is a mechanism for adjusting the rate of data flow through the filter graph in response to run-time performance. If a renderer filter is receiving too much data or too little data, it can send a quality message. The quality message requests an adjustment in the data rate. By default, quality messages travel upstream from the renderer until they reach a filter that can respond (if any). An application can also implement a custom quality manager. In that case, the renderer passes quality messages directly to the application's quality manager.

This article contains the following topics.

Data Flow for Filter Developers

Writing DirectShow Filters