The VideoLAN Forums

I have been trying to remove myself from Microsoft/Apple as much as possible. But one step at a time. At the same time to support open source "donationware" software as much as I can by using it, spreading the word and by donations.

What I am starting to understand, and Please tell me about how I am wrong on this is that one of the ways Windows(Apple), fights open source, Linux, creativity and competition is by the use of Directshow ??

That DirectShow is included on Windows and is Microsoft's way to allow programmers to use multi-media applications. If Microsoft doesn't wants to make it difficult for applications that are multi-platform, use Linux and more industry standards, then it won't allow those codecs/encoders/decoders, etc to work within their proprietary DirectShow application environment.

That is why there is a need form some special plugins to allow superior audio codecs like ogg and FLAC to be played in Windows Media Player. BUT ...the "raw form" of the codecs will not be able to be decoded in WMP ?

That goes for Divx as well ?

I would also assume that and PLEASE tell me if I am at all correct on this, that multi-media products that do NOT use DirectShow will probably use less system resources. Then on the other hand, the plug-ins which somehow allow ogg, flac, ape, etc to play in WMP, probably use greater overhead by having to be programmed with some kind of shell which lets them use Microsoft's DirectShow environment.

Do I have any type of clue on this ??

Please let me know about the load on my Vista Ultimate 64 bit system by using VLC instead of WMP or another DirectShow multimedia player ??

Thanks,

Jon

DirectShow registers codecs system-wide.

VLC doesn't use DirectShow but its own set of codecs, already in it. While sometimes VLC is faster, this is not always the case because some DirectShow codecs are using hardware that we cannot access from an open source application.