Eric Anderson's Blog : Playback

WMP FireFox Plug-in at 6.1M Downloads

errand — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:03:25 GMT

I just checked over with the Port 25 guys, and we are at 6.1 million downloads for the FireFox plug-in as of yesterday - nice! Congrats again to the team for pulling this together!

Firefox documentation is coming!

errand — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:18:00 GMT

It's been taking a little longer than expected, but the updated documentation for the Firefox plug-in is on its way... it will be posted to msdn once it's finished. I have an unofficial FAQ I can send out to anyone who wants more info on the supported design time parameters and scripting interfaces while you wait for the official docs to be posted... just leave me a comment or send me a message through the blog.

On another note, I've moved over from the media platform team in Windows to the Media Center Devices (read: Extender) team. Since I started my blog, I’ve kept a list of potential blog topics to write up when I get a few extra minutes. One of the topics has been to write up about how Extender works in a bit more detail since I had a pretty bad experience figuring out a connection issue I hit last year when I added another router to my network and assigned it a static IP (which put my Xbox 360/MCX on a different subnet than my PC). Anyway, that was number 9 on my list of topics… it’ll probably get moved up now. And judging by how often I’ve been posting, that means I’ll have something posted in about six months instead of two years J

Windows Media Player on Firefox

errand — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:09:00 GMT

Alright, you can all breathe a collective sigh of relief as I am actually posting a blog entry. The delayed posting I think is worth it: today we are releasing a new Firefox plug-in for WMP! We’ve been tracking the issues in the forums about WMP showing some odd aspect ratio issues, as well as other bugs under Firefox, and we decided to tackle the problem and write a new plug-in to get this working again. Apologies to all for how long it took and the relative quietness we’ve had on this front – we’ve been heads-down getting Vista shipped and then directly afterwards we started working on this plug-in.

There is an existing Netscape plug-in out there, but we recommend that people use our new plug-in when developing web sites that use the WMP OCX. In a nutshell, here’s what we did with the new one:

New robust design that addresses all of the known issues with the old plug-in
WMP will now work in Firefox in Windows Vista
Support for the WMP OCX scripting interfaces

The plug-in has been scoped to support a subset of the 6.4 design time parameters, so existing sites that want to use the new plug-in may need to update some of their HTML tags. If you use the plug-ins new MIME type though, you can take advantage of fuller design time parameter support, based on 9.0 interfaces. We will have the MSDN documentation updated to reflect the supported tags/elements in the near future. In the meantime, if you want to start using the new plug-in, you can force your sites to use it by using the new application/x-ms-wmp MIME type.

Feel free to leave any feedback on the plug-in here, or contact me with further questions.

Video card anyone?

errand — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 22:04:00 GMT

The million dollar question these days seems to be what video card people should buy to watch high-definition video on Windows Vista. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve answered this question… well you get the point. So I’m just going to post this info and start pointing people here.

Laptops don’t allow you to upgrade your video card, so there’s not much point talking about mobile parts unless you are looking to buy a new laptop. Laptop video cards are integrated with the mainboard, and how well it will perform is generally a factor with how it was implemented. For instance, an ATI x200 Mobility graphics adapter can do pretty well if it is paired with the right memory – and I don’t just mean the amount of memory, but the bandwidth as well. That card with a good chunk of dual-data channel memory can perform pretty good – pair that same card with single-channel memory and you may not have the best experience. For that reason, you can’t just make a blanket statement about the performance a particular mobile graphics chip – it’s all about the system it ships in. But back to the people who can upgrade their desktop graphics cards…

There are two big players in the discrete graphics market, and if you ask any of your friends what graphics card they’re using at your next LAN party (I’ve only been to one of these but the wife’s ridicule has lived with me ever since), and it will either be ATI or Nvidia. So, that being the case those are the two graphics manufacturers we’ll look at.

Nvidia and ATI took slightly different approaches with their hardware design – Nvidia has dedicated video processor chips on their cards, while ATI has dedicated logic units in their GPUs to handle video processing. Both of these are reasonable implementations, although in theory it seems that there may be some slight advantage in having a dedicated video process unit with Windows Vista. This would allow the GPU to spend more of its time crunching on the 3D-heavy DWM (painting the desktop) while concurrently processing the video stream. In reality, most of the current cards are beefy enough to handle small limitations.

If you go with Nvidia, then minimally I would recommend a 6600GT (note the GT on the end) card for HD content to be watchable. The amount of VRAM and the memory bandwidth are two key HW requirements for getting HD to play properly. The 6600GT has enough of both to work pretty well – I have a 6600GT w/ 128MB VRAM on my main desktop running multi-mon at pretty high res’s and it still works solidly for me on Vista. If you want to pay more money for a card in hopes it will last longer, then I’d recommend a 7600GT or greater.

If you go with ATI, then minimally I would recommend an x800 card for HD content to be watchable. I have an x800 XL card that’s been running Windows Vista x64 for the last year, and it has been working very well – and I keep the TV going through Media Center perpetually on this box. If you are willing to shell out more money and get one of ATI’s newer cards, then I’d recommend an x1600 or greater.

Building a playback app (DShow vs. MF vs. OCX)

errand — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 18:05:00 GMT

If you want to add audio/video playback capabilities to your Windows application, you have several options to choose from. For tighter control, you can take advantage of the API exposed in lower-level infrastructure components, like DirectShow, the Format SDK, or Media Foundation. If you just want generic, universal playback functionality, you can use the WMP OCX.

I think it’s a common misconception that the OCX is only used for embedding in web pages, in places like gamespot.com or cnn.com. In fact, the OCX can be embedded in a standalone app and used solely for its playback infrastructure, without the user even knowing that it’s there. Media Center for example uses the OCX for some of its playback paths even though from the user perspective, you wouldn’t know that there are completely different pipelines being used when switching between DVD, TV, or WMV.

In Windows Vista, there are a lot of benefits to using MF, including enhanced glitch resilience. But there are still limitations in terms of the video formats supported natively in MF, and a simple intuitive programming model. DShow has been the defacto Windows A/V standard for the last several versions of Windows, but it doesn’t have a high-level API to program to, neither is it particularly resilient to system load in Windows Vista.

The OCX provides a sophisticated playback model that spans all the different pipelines, while maintaining a relatively easy API. Rollover is a big piece of functionality that the OCX provides, in that it will always choose the most optimal playback pipeline and then roll back as it needs to. The OCX also has some limitations in terms of overhead (namely playlist support) and trying to overlay text or other UI on top of the video (including if you try to use a non-rectangular video surface), but it is otherwise a solid mid-weight playback solution.

For future versions of Windows we’re looking at simplifying the playback story – making it easier to embed playback functionality into apps without having to deal with the complexities of different playback infrastructures without some of the current limitations in the OCX.

11/2/06 Addendum:
I just came across a whitepaper that a coworker of mine wrote that goes into a bit more detail on this for those that are interested. I would’ve taken it a different direction - maybe started it off with a joke about three guys who go into a bar - but hey, it’s still a good write-up. Enjoy! http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwmt/html/t_d_migrating_from_directshow_to_media_foundation__cyor.asp