About DirectShow (DirectShow)
[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine, and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation.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 section describes the overall architecture of DirectShow. There is a lot of information in this section, and you may not need to know all of it. Therefore, you might prefer to skim this section at first, and then look in Using DirectShow for the topics that match your application requirements. You can refer back to this section if you have specific questions about some aspect of the DirectShow architecture.
This section contains the following topics:
- DirectShow System Overview
- The Filter Graph and Its Components
- Building the Filter Graph
- Data Flow in the Filter Graph
- Event Notification in DirectShow
- Time and Clocks in DirectShow
- Dynamic Graph Building
- Plug-in Distributors
Related topics
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