The Multimedia Documentation - Win32 Multimedia Programmer's Reference

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The Multimedia Documentation

It is not necessary to read all the multimedia documentation to develop a multimedia application, unless it is a very complex multimedia application. The documentation is divided into parts; the parts you need to read depend on the type of application you are writing. Each part has overviews for several multimedia interfaces.

The Media Control Interface book discusses how to design applications that use the media control interface (MCI)

which offers applications a standard set of commands to use when communicating with any multimedia device. The MCIWnd Window Class discusses how to design applications that use an interface based on window classes. This interface is useful is you want to add sound or video to an application and you do not need to implement complicated editing or recording functionality. MCI is useful if you want to implement a customized user interface for your sound or video files but you do not need to take full advantage of the capabilities of a particular device. Although many MCI commands are appropriate for any multimedia device, some commands exploit the features of a particular device or class of devices. You can use this interface to implement a customized user interface and achieve greater control over a multimedia device.

The Multimedia Audio book contains overviews that describe how to design applications that use multimedia interfaces. These interfaces are: waveform audio, musical instrument digital interface (MIDI), audio compression manager, and audio mixers. These interfaces allow applications to achieve nearly complete control over an audio or video presentation. Read these parts if your application needs to take full advantage of one or more multimedia devices, if you plan to implement recording or editing features, or if you need a custom format for your data.

The Video for Windows book contains overviews that describe video interfaces. The interfaces can be used to work with video files, and manage compression and decompression services for these files. The AVIFile functions and macros allow you to access waveform audio and audio-video interleaved (AVI) files as one or more data streams. The video compression manager provides support for video compression. The window class, AVICap, makes it easier to develop an interface for video capture. You use custom file and stream handlers to read from or write to a file that is in a nonstandard format. The DrawDib functions provide high performance image-drawing capabilities for DIBs.

The Miscellaneous Multimedia Services book discusses other multimedia interfaces. These interfaces include joysticks, multimedia timers, the file input and output services for multimedia files.

The Multimedia Reference book contains descriptions of each multimedia element:

Multimedia functions
Multimedia structures
Multimedia messages
Multimedia macros
Multimedia commands
Multimedia command strings
Multimedia interfaces
Multimedia types
Multimedia constants

The Appendix contains several useful references:

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