Is There a Windows Video Codec Common Dialog? - windows

Does Windows have a common dialog to select video codecs? If there is one, how can I create one in c#? I'm asking because I'm currently developing with a plugin that seems to have included extremely dated codecs, and am not sure if the plugin is simply retrieving a list of codecs from the system. I don't have the source of the plugin, so I can't look at the source code directly.
Attached is a screenshot of the dialog:
Screenshot http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/fb936bd413.png
Thanks!

That looks like the save options dialog from Video for Windows. Specifically, I believe that's the dialog that pops up when you use the AviSaveOptions function from avifil32.dll.
You could probably call that from C# using P/Invoke if you wanted to.
The dialog does get a list of video codecs from the system. However, VfW only supports VfW codecs, not the newer DirectShow codecs. Any of the more modern codecs you might have installed on your system are going to be DirectShow codecs, more likely than not.
If you want a more modern codec, you're going to have to install a VfW version of that codec.

No, there is no directly accessible codecs list available in the form of a CommonDialog in C#.
CFP.

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Windows API are DirectShow and Media Foundation (mind availability across Windows verions). You need a codec installed in Windows to be able to play the file, stock codec is only provided with Windows 7 editions. A choice of third party codecs is available.
Another option is to use a different framework such as ffmpeg which includes support for container formats and decoders.

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Include a dummy video in your resources that is similar to the video content you want to play, then try to load it off-screen; if it works, you know that the codecs are correctly installed for the format you care about (i.e. both the container and video/audio codecs are there, and they are working)

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There is a managed implementation for mono called csvorbis, it includes a sample which outputs a wav file this didn't need many changes to work with XNA's SoundEffect class. I did a whole track at once, this took a few seconds in the emulator so you may need to stream it using DynamicSoundEffect for better results. The mooncodecs folder has a codec for the desktop version based on csvorbis which may be worth a look aswell.
Ogg Vorbis is not a supported codec on Windows Phone 7 and the platform supports no way of adding support for custom codecs.
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The DivX project itself seems to concentrate on making Codecs and tools for end users. Are there any C/C++ friendly projects that make playback of divx content in Win32 or Cocoa apps possible?
Look at mplayer sources - it uses the ffmpeg library that handles decoding from a number of formats.
DivX is a compressor that conforms to MPEG-4 Part 2. XviD and some versions of Windows Media are also implementations of the standard. So anything that can decompress MPEG-4 Part 2 should be able to handle things compressed with DivX.
As for actual decompression libraries, I'd recommend libavcodec. It's widely-used (= good support), cross-platform, and open-source (LGPL, so can be used in commercial apps). It's also fairly easy to use from it's C binding. It can open and play many different codecs (and with libavformat, handle many different wrappers i.e. avi, mkv, etc.).
If it's Windows-only, using the OS-provided Video For Windows might be a better option if you just want to play MPEG since you wouldn't need to ship it with your app and you avoid potential license issues. Be warned, though, that this requires the user to have certain codecs installed. On Win7 (and Vista I think) the MPEG codecs required to play DivX/XviD are installed by default, however they're not on XP...
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Which video and audio format/codec should I use?

Environment: Windows XP/Vista, VS2008, C#/.NET 2.0, VideoGrabber.
Hi All,
I'm writing an app which captures cameras input and encodes them into a movie file (including sound).
My client suggests I encode the movie using the DivX codec. But it's not installed by default and it's not redistributable: Users would have to download, install and configure it themselves.
Is there a Codec available in default Windows (XP+) installations that I could use to encode video and sound? It must support compression. Ideally, I should be able to programmatically set basic configuration.
Note: I read this question but it doesn't actually address my needs.
TIA,
Is there a Codec available in default Windows (XP+) installations that I could use to encode video and sound?
About the best you can hope for is WMV2 (WMV v8). You may be able to encode it using qasf.dll.
The codecs you get for AVI in XP are all woeful efforts from the early days of ‘Multimedia PCs’: things like Cinepak and RLE, which are of zero use for modern full colour/resolution video, and Intel 4:2:0, which is only chroma subsampling, not really actual video compression.
If you need better than that you'll have to start embedding your own codecs, eg. from ffmpeg.
But it's not installed by default and it's not redistributable: Users would have to download, install and configure it themselves.
That's best anyway. Silently installing codecs onto a system is rather antisocial as there are often clashes between them and you could end up messing up other DirectShow applications. For example there are (at least) three different common DirectShow codecs that can handle “DivX” (which is really nothing more than MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile video plus MP3 audio in an AVI container): DivX, Xvid and ffdshow. Having more than one installed can be a recipe for bugs.
Not sure how useful this is to you, but I was trying to answer that very question just recently. This article suggests DIB, I420, or IYUV are supported on all platforms... at least in OpenCV. I had the least trouble with I420.

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