Default Quality Control

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[The feature associated with this page, DirectShow, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine, and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation. Those features have been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation instead of DirectShow, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

The DirectShow Base Classes implement some default behaviors for video quality control.

Quality messages start at the renderer. The base class for video renderers is CBaseVideoRenderer, which has the following behavior:

  1. When the video renderer receives a sample, it compares the time stamp on the sample with the current reference time.
  2. The video renderer generates a quality message. In the base class, the Proportion member of the quality message is limited to a range of 500 (50%) to 2000 (200%). Values outside this range could result in abrupt quality changes.
  3. By default, the video renderer sends the quality message to the upstream output pin (the pin connected to its input pin). Applications can override this behavior by calling the SetSink method.

What happens next depends on the upstream filter. Typically, this is a transform filter. The base class for transform filters is CTransformFilter, which uses the CTransformInputPin and CTransformOutputPin classes to implement input and output pins. Together, these classes have the following behavior:

  1. The CTransformOutputPin::Notify method calls CTransformFilter::AlterQuality, a private method on the filter base class.
  2. Derived filters can override AlterQuality to handle the quality message. By default, AlterQuality ignores the quality message.
  3. If AlterQuality does not handle the quality message, the output pin calls CBaseInputPin::PassNotify, a private method on the filter's input pin.
  4. PassNotify passes the quality message to the appropriate place—the next upstream output pin, or a custom quality manager.

Assuming that no transform filter handles the quality message, the message eventually reaches the output pin on the source filter. In the base classes, CBasePin::Notify returns E_NOTIMPL. How a particular source filter handles quality messages depends on the nature of the source. Some sources, such as live video capture, cannot perform meaningful quality control. Other sources can adjust the rate at which they deliver samples.

The following diagram illustrates the default behavior.

quality control in the base classes

The base video renderer implements IQualityControl::Notify, which means you can pass quality messages to the renderer itself. If you set the Proportion member to a value less than 1000, the video renderer inserts a wait period between each frame that it renders, in effect slowing down the renderer. (You might do this to reduce system usage, for example.) For more information, see CBaseVideoRenderer::ThrottleWait. Setting the Proportion member to a value greater than 1000 has no effect.

Quality-Control Management