About the Video Compression Manager

  • Article

Typically, installable compressors operate with video-image data stored in audio-video interleaved (AVI) files. This overview explains the programming techniques used to access installable compressors through VCM and covers the following topics:

  • VCM and the Video for Windows architecture
  • Compressing and decompressing image data from your application
  • Using VCM renderers to draw data from your application
  • VCM functions and structures

Before you read this overview, you should be familiar with the Microsoft Win32 graphic services. In particular, bitmaps and bitmap-related structures, such as BITMAPINFO and BITMAPINFOHEADER, are used extensively by VCM. For additional information about the BITMAPINFO and BITMAPINFOHEADER structures, see Bitmaps.

  • Note   The audio compression manager (ACM) provides system-level support for audio compression and decompression drivers. For a description of the audio compression services, see Audio Compression Manager.