no more 2 GB limit

I took a look at the OpenDML stuff, but in the end I decided to solve this the MS way: I wrote my own DirectShow show source filter that inserts frames (as bitmaps) into a video stream.

That turned out to be the *easy* part! The SDK's "ball" example was a pretty good starting part for writing a DirectShow source filter. The only real problem is that the ball filter draws the frames itself, whereas I needed to draw the frames in the application, and then pass them to the source filter. Turns out MS thought of that: you can override the DoBufferProcessingLoop function, cool.

There's also the minor detail of how to call my filter's "add frame" function from the application: turns out that requires creating a new COM interface. A bit of research, but not too bad. And of course I need some application code to create a filter graph, connect all the "pins" together and run the graph. There are examples of this all over the place, nothing new here.

The real problem came from an unexpected direction: how to set the video compression options? The Vfw AVIFile API had a wonderful function called AVISaveOptions: it displayed a dialog listing all your video compressors, and allowed you to select one and configure it. And in DirectShow? Nothing like that exists. Insane but true.

So I wound up writing a DirectShow Video Compression dialog object. You pass it your source and destination filters, and it displays the dialog, and returns a fully-configured compressor filter.

The bottom line? I have developed two reusable technologies:
1) A DirectShow BMP to AVI converter.
2) A DirectShow Video Compression dialog

I suspect both could be useful to other developers, so I'm going to submit them to CodeProject later. Right now my priority is integrating them into a new version of Whorld.