Overview
This standard represents the specification of the digitalvideo device class for the Media Control Interface (MCI), or DV MCI. It applies to hardware and software manufacturers of digital video products as well as ISVs creating applications using the digital video products. This specification was developed in collaboration with OEMs to ensure that it reflects the inherent characteristics of digital video hardware. However, this specification is not limited to a single manufacturer's hardware and is expected to be applicable to a wide range of hardware implementations.
This document is not self-contained. In particular, it assumes you have a general familiarity with the documentation for Windows with multimedia extensions, as well as a general familiarity with Windows programming. This document contains the following sections:
- The overview summarizes the documentation and lists available resources.
- Chapter 1, "Digital Video Commands for MCI," provides an overview of the characteristics of a digital-video device and introduces the digital video command set.
- Chapter 2, "Digital Video Command Strings," lists the MCI command strings available for digital video devices.
- Chapter 3, "Digital Video Command Messages," lists the MCI command messages available for digital video devices.
- Appendix A, "Archaic String Commands," lists archaic string commands.
- Appendix B, "Digital Video MCI Command String Syntax," summarizes the digital-video commands and their proper usage for digital video devices that use files.
- Appendix C, "Video Overlay MCI Command String Syntax," summarizes the digital-video commands and their proper usage for video overlay devices.
The major purpose of this document is to provide clear guidelines to any developer of a digital-video device driver as to how to implement specific features. Because a feature is described herein does not imply that the developer of a compliant digital-video device driver must support that feature. All digital-video device drivers should use the following guidelines:
a. A digital-video device driver that does not support a specific aspect of the specification should return an error code of MCIERR_UNSUPPORTED_FUNCTION.
b. A digital-video device driver that supports functionality described by this specification should use those aspects of the specification relevant to performing that functionality.
c. All command strings and MCI messages should support the test flag. This lets an application check whether a device driver supports a proposed action.
This standard presents new and updated information for the MCI command set. This document relies on the information previously published for MCI commands and programming. The following sources contain this information:
- The Multimedia Development Kit (MDK) 1.0 Programmer's Reference
- The Windows 3.1 Software Development Kit (SDK) Multimedia Programmer's Reference
- The Windows 3.1 Software Development Kit (SDK) Multimedia Programmer's Guide
- The Multimedia Programmer's Reference from Microsoft Press
- The Multimedia Programmer's Workbook from Microsoft Press
- The Windows 3.1 Device Development Kit (DDK) Multimedia Device Adaptation Guide (this guide is needed only by device driver developers)