Hardware and Software Requirements

Hardware and Software Requirements

Although DirectShow applications should run across a broad range of computers, for the purposes of this book, I ll make some very specific recommendations about the kinds of components, both hardware and software, that you should have while working on the example code in this book. Although you don t absolutely have to have the configuration as I ll give it, the more you differ from this configuration, the more your own results will differ from those given in the text. Although you can play an MP3 audio file on a lowly 486-class processor, encoding an MP3 on the same machine would take a long time more time than most people are willing to wait. And if you re working with video streams, you ll need the fastest computer, memory, and hard disk you can afford. Basic hardware and software requirements to work with the examples given in this book are shown in the tables that follow.

Table I-1. Basic Hardware Requirements

CPU	Intel Celeron, Pentium III, or Pentium 4; AMD Duron or Athlon, running at 1 GHz or faster
RAM	256 MB or greater; 512 MB or greater for best performance
Hard disk	30 GB or greater, with at least 15 GB of free space
Video card	ATI Radeon 8500 All-In-Wonder (or equivalent card with broadcast TV tuner)
Sound card	Any DirectShow-supported sound card (most sound cards) with microphone and/or line inputs
Webcam	Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000 (This webcam has an integrated microphone; you ll need a separate microphone if your webcam doesn t have one built-in.)
Digital camcorder	Sony DRC-TRV900 or equivalent (Most digital camcorders will work, as long as they have FireWire/IEEE 1394 capabilities, but some older model Canon cameras don t perform well with DirectShow.)

Table I-2. Basic Software Requirements

Operating system	Windows XP with Service Pack 1 (Certain DirectShow features for personal video recorders are implemented only in this version of Windows XP.)
Development tool	Microsoft Visual Studio .NET or Visual C++ .NET
DirectX SDK	Release 9 or later
Windows Media Format SDK	Release 9 or later
Windows Media Player	Version 9 or later
Windows Media Encoder	Version 9 or later

Before you begin to work through the examples in this book, you ll need to install all hardware and software as given in the previous tables. Very few configurations will exactly match what I ve listed, especially on the hardware side of things; configurations vary widely in the PC world. However, it s important to try to get a software configuration that s as close as possible to the one I ve given. This book was written for the latest version of DirectX SDK (version 9 as of this writing), Windows XP (Service Pack 1 is a must-have addition because it adds support for features covered in Chapter 7), the Windows Media Format 9 Series SDK, and Windows Media Player 9 Series. If any of these components are missing from your computer, some of the examples given in this book simply won t work, and you might go nuts looking for your own mistakes before you realize that the problem isn t with your code but is with your configuration.

The latest version of Windows Media Player can be downloaded from the Microsoft Web site, along with the Windows XP Service Pack. Before you go any further, install any software you need to ensure that your software configuration matches the one I ve given.