Microsoft Active Movie

• New video interface, competitive with QuickTime.
• Home page: http://198.105.232.6:80/imedia/activemovie/activem.htm
• Technical info: http://198.105.232.6:80/imedia/activemovie/amtech.htm
• Here's the beta release: http://www.microsoft.com/advtech/ActiveMovie/download.htm
• Part of the DirectX architecture. Possibly also known as DirectVideo? No -- DirectVideo is the name for Video for Windows on top of DirectX.
• The successor to Video for Windows.
• Doesn't seem to support video capture yet, just for playback, so the low level multimedia services are still important.
• Used to be called "Quartz". Quartz is "an architecture for the processing of streams of multimedia data." According to Microsoft's "Creating Platforms for Innovative Internet Platforms" article (http://www.microsoft.com/intdev/intover.htm), Quartz uses "Filter Graphs" to handle new media types, such as streams of digitized video and audio. Expect Microsoft to open and mine the Quartz vein more deeply now that Netscape has acquired InSoft and its INTV!, CoolTalk, and CoolView products as the foundation for its LiveMedia add-on to future versions of Netscape Navigator.
• http://www.microsoft.com/DEVNEWS/ACTMOVIE.HTM
• Microsoft Announces ActiveMovie, Cross-Platform Digital Video Technology, March 8, 1996
• Next generation of cross-platform digital video technology for the desktop and the Internet.
• ActiveMovie provides the ability to create and deliver titles on multiple platforms with synchronized audio, video, and special effects.
• ActiveMovie, scheduled to be available in the second week of March in beta form, is planned for release simultaneously for the Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems in June 1996.
• It is scheduled to be delivered for the Apple Power Macintosh platform later this year.
• For information about ActiveMovie, refer to: http://www.microsoft.com/ie/news
• Users will benefit from the following features:
  • State-of-the-art MPEG playback for full-screen, television-quality video on mainstream systems.
  • Internet playback and streaming for fast and easy playback of all popular media types on the Internet.
  • A flexible, extensible architecture for integration of new technologies, third-party enhancements, and real-time special effects.
• ActiveMovie uses and is integrated with Microsoft DirectX technology, which automatically accelerates video playback on DirectDraw API-compatible graphics cards and enables special effects and combinations of 2-D and 3-D elements with digital video. For example, ActiveMovie's integration with the Direct3D API allows special effects such as promotional presentations.
• ActiveMovie provides a comprehensive set of services for playback of MPEG movies. It is capable of decoding MPEG entirely in software (without requiring an MPEG chip) and playing it back full-screen on an Intel 90 Mhz Pentium-based PC with a low-cost graphics adapter at 24 frames per second (fps) with 11 KHz stereo.
• ActiveMovie transparently implements MPEG decoding hardware.
• Allows developers to deliver content that plays on the Windows 95, Windows NT, and Power Macintosh platforms.
• The beta software development kit (SDK) includes an OLE Control that Internet developers can use to add video playback and real-time media streaming to Internet applications.
• ActiveMovie is scheduled to be integrated with and included in the next release of Microsoft Internet Explorer, enabling Internet users to efficiently play back popular media formats on the Web, including MPEG Audio and Video, .AVI files, QuickTime, AU, .WAV, MIDI, and AIFF.
• ActiveMovie's flexible architecture and system of replaceable "filters" makes it easier to develop products that improve or modify video playback in real time and to incorporate the latest in special effects into titles. An extensible set of ActiveMovie components, the filters perform functions such as retrieving video from a CD and decompressing that video from its stored digital format.
• Developers can replace, change, or add to a set of provided filters to modify and enhance video and audio playback. For example, an educational music-title vendor could provide its users with the capability to select and mix sounds dynamically from different musical instruments in a music video, or a video-editing tool company could easily create a set of filters that would allow customers to add contrast, transition, and lighting effects to movies.
• More than 20 software developers, hardware vendors, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) support ActiveMovie, including Adobe Systems Inc., Intel Corp., Macromedia Inc., and Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. In addition, the Open MPEG consortium (representing 32 companies) and the Japanese Open MPEG Windows Forum (representing 32 companies) have announced support.
• ActiveMovie is scheduled to ship to software developers and hardware manufacturers in June 1996 for redistribution at no charge. Users can expect software titles incorporating ActiveMovie technology to be on the market this summer. Developers requesting information about ActiveMovie can e-mail mmdinfo@microsoft.com.
• The following filters are provided as part of the ActiveMovie SDK.
  • MPEG, AVI, and QuickTime source filters.
  • MPEG, AVI and QuickTime video decompression filters.
  • MPEG audio decompression filter.
  • MPEG stream splitter.
  • DirectX-compatible video and audio rendering filters.
  • Additional sample code filters delivering special effects such as video contrast.
• ActiveMovie has COM, OLE, and MCI interfaces.
• Typically, existing applications that use the MCI command set are easily ported, whereas applications that access lower-level multimedia services will take more work to rewrite.
• When writing a new application, developers have several options.
  • To add ActiveMovie services like MPEG and QuickTime video playback to an exiting application developers can incorporate the ActiveMovie OLE control into their applications or access the COM interfaces on the filter graph manager directly. Both Visual Basic version 4.0 and Visual C++ allow access to the control or the COM interfaces. Filters within a filter graph are typically written in C or C++ for best performance. The ActiveMovie SDK provides a C++ class library for writing filters, the ActiveMovie OCX control, and tools for constructing and testing filter graphs. It also provides many sample filters as well as comprehensive documentation.
  • Developers who want to modify the media stream in some way, for example, to create special video effects, or source video from a special source, can incorporate both the filter graph manager object and a custom filter. The instantiated filter graph manager is used to generate and manage the filter graph, and the custom filter can be inserted in a preconfigured filter graph, which can then be loaded by the filter graph manager.
  • Alternately, an application can dynamically insert a custom filter into an existing filter graph that has been created by the filter graph manager. For example, an application that plays MPEG movies and introduces a video effects filter into the media stream can instantiate the filter graph manager, instruct it to build an MPEG playback filter graph, and can then insert the effects filter into the filter graph.