Programming DirectShow applications in C#: A set of tutorials

• Download Tutorials Help file (.chm) - 307 Kb
• Download Tutorials code - 241 Kb

Introduction

Besides the Microsoft SDK documentation, the information needed to program DirectShow applications is limited. This web site supplies many of the most useful references for programming these applications in C#. In order to continue this tradition, I have created a help file (.chm) that contains ten tutorials that illustrate how DirectShow applications can be written in C#.

Background

In general, the resources for programming DirectShow applications are scarce. In the past few months, I have written many tutorials that illustrate how to perform many common tasks in DirectShow with C#. I have put all these tutorials in one .chm file and provided access to all the source code samples from it. Moreover, the CodeProject web site has a nice messaging system to support the users of the code provided on this site, which should make these tutorials even more useful.

Using the code

I have provided a Visual Studio project file for each tutorial, and I have also included a .cmd file to compile it from the command line. Sometimes, these .cmd files contain references that need to be changed to reflect your local settings. I have mentioned these in the tutorial "readme.txt" file. Some tutorials will only run on 32-bit machines.

Points of Interest

The tutorials show how a simple multimedia player, a simple capture, a jukebox, and an append utility application can be written. Moreover, we have implemented versions of the Picture-In-a-Picture, custom allocator/presenter, custom image compositor samples from the DirectShow SDK in C#. And we have implemented the functionality of the EzRbg24 filter in C#.

Limitations and known issues

As mentioned previously, some samples will only work correctly on 32-bit machines. Moreover, I don't claim that these are optimal solutions. Many years ago, when I was teaching a VC++/MFC class, one student asked me where I was taking the code that I was using during the lectures. I replied that I had two directories with more than eighty samples in each of them, that I had written over a while. I was just picking some of these and brushed them up a little before presenting them and asking the students to modify or extend them (during the lectures or for assignments). I give these samples in the same spirit; but I'm still a long way from having more than hundred and sixty samples to chose from ;-)