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DVD Applications

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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine, and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation.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

DirectShow provides a component called the DVD Navigator source filter which simplifies DVD navigation tasks in C++. The DVD Navigator has all the capabilities that you find on a full-featured stand-alone DVD player, plus additional capabilities specific to playing DVDs on personal computers. Using the DVD Navigator, C++ and scripting developers can create full-featured DVD applications without referring to the DVD specification. The DVD Navigator, in coordination with the decoder filters, also handles regional management and copyright protection (CSS and analog copy protection), isolating application developers from these details.

The DVD Navigator filter works across an entire DVD-Video volume, which consists of the files in the VIDEO_TS directory. Unlike most DirectShow source filters that work with individual streams or files, the DVD Navigator uses the DVD-Video structure of titles, chapters, and time codes. Developers wishing to play individual MPEG-2 files in DirectShow should use the MPEG-2 Demultiplexer instead of the DVD Navigator filter. See MPEG-2 Support in DirectShow for more information.

Note

To play DVDs, the user must have an MPEG-2 decoder.

 

This section contains the following topics.

For references on DVD/MPEG2 decoder development, see DVD Decoder Development in DirectShow.

Using DirectShow