Summary

Summary

The AVI file format is an older but still widely used format for the storage of DV on the Windows platform. Although AVI is somewhat complex in its nested structure of chunks and lists, it s easy to write applications or DirectShow filters that walk an existing AVI file or create an AVI file from scratch. AVI is a generic container format for a variety of types of stream data, including video, audio, MIDI, and text. Although particularly well suited to the storage of uncompressed video data, the AVI format can also be used with a variety of the video or audio codecs on the Windows platform (including Windows Media 9 Series) to produce compact files. However, AVI has limitations, so Microsoft has developed a new container format named ASF that s suitable for digital media content that is to be streamed over a network, as well as for content to be played back or stored on a local machine. Microsoft itself uses the ASF format as the container for digital media content compressed using its state-of-the-art Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video codecs. Therefore, before we conclude our examination of DirectShow, we need to explore the new generation of Windows Media technologies and how they re used in DirectShow.