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DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. more...

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It is a replacement for Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows technology. Based on the Microsoft Windows Component Object Model (COM) framework, DirectShow provides a common interface for media across many programming languages, and is an extensible, filter-based framework that can render or record media files on demand at the behest of the user or developer. The DirectShow development tools and documentation are distributed as part of the Microsoft Platform SDK. DirectShow additionally contains DirectX plugins for audio signal processing and DirectX Video Acceleration for accelerated video playback.

DirectShow's counterparts include Apple's QuickTime framework and gstreamer. Microsoft plans to replace DirectShow with Media Foundation in future Windows versions beginning with Windows Vista.

History

The direct predecessor of DirectShow, ActiveMovie (codenamed Quartz), was originally chartered to provide MPEG-1 file playback support for Windows. It was also intended as a future replacement for media processing frameworks like Video for Windows, which had never been designed to handle codecs that put video frames into a different order during the compression process, and the Media Control Interface, which had never been fully ported to a 32-bit environment and did not utilize COM.

The Quartz team started with an existing project called Clockwork. Clockwork was a modular media processing framework in which semi-independent components worked together to process digital media streams, and had previously been used in several projects, including the Microsoft Interactive Television (MITV) project and another project named Tiger.

After ActiveMovie was announced in March 1996, it was released in May 1996 bundled with the beta version of Internet Explorer 3.0. In March 1997, Microsoft announced that ActiveMovie would become part of the DirectX 5 suite of technologies, and around July started referring to it as DirectShow, reflecting Microsoft's efforts at the time to consolidate technologies that worked "directly" with hardware under a common naming scheme. DirectShow became a standard component of all Windows operating systems starting with Windows 98. In version 7 of DirectX, DirectShow became part of the mainline distribution of the DirectX SDK and was placed alongside other DirectX APIs such as DirectInput.

Read more at Wikipedia.org