OK, so you people who have developing these type of application for as long as you have probably will think this is a very stupid question. But I am new to programming desktop apps (been doing web programming). But I am getting into c# and have a few questions for you guys. I have only really gotten into transferring data back and forth from databases and such so as you can be sure I am very begginer.

I am just wondering why there are such issues with things like certain types of video cards. I mean I would think that if you wrote the app to for directx and the card supported directx it should work. I mean isnt this why the card manufactures have to develope drivers so people can just write applications and have it work.

ATI for example (seems the AIW has the most problems), do they just have bad drivers. I guess I am missing somthing but I just always thought that unless you were putting somthing in the into the app that the card specifically didn't have support for it should work.

I guess my question is really, were is the brakdown? Why doesn't any card that has wdm drivers or whatever just work?

[frodo]

guess you are confused about tv & directx

DirectX is used for rendering and (i think) mediaportal works on
pretty any VGA card. Offcourse MP can be slow if you got a very old
vga card, but it should work.

For TV-card however Mediaportal is using directshow
while directshow is pretty standard its documentation is very bad
This lead to people (manufacterors) interpreting the documentation in many ways and this causes that all cards behave differently
When you do action A for tv-card type 1 and it works, then it can easily
be that action A does not work for tv-card type 2

Besides this we see that some manufactors are 'protecting' their drivers
an example is avermedia which has very weird drivers which simply
dont follow the directshow specifications on purpose.

All considered this makes it very hard , if not impossible, to
support all types of tvcards.
I guess thats why microsoft only supports MCE cards in their mediacenter

frodo

Originally Posted by frodo

guess you are confused about tv & directx

DirectX is used for rendering and (i think) mediaportal works on
pretty any VGA card. Offcourse MP can be slow if you got a very old
vga card, but it should work.

For TV-card however Mediaportal is using directshow
while directshow is pretty standard its documentation is very bad
This lead to people (manufacterors) interpreting the documentation in many ways and this causes that all cards behave differently
When you do action A for tv-card type 1 and it works, then it can easily
be that action A does not work for tv-card type 2

Besides this we see that some manufactors are 'protecting' their drivers
an example is avermedia which has very weird drivers which simply
dont follow the directshow specifications on purpose.

All considered this makes it very hard , if not impossible, to
support all types of tvcards.
I guess thats why microsoft only supports MCE cards in their mediacenter

frodo

thanks frodo, so that makes sense then. I figured that it would fall under the manufacturer and there drivers.

Sorry about the confusion between directshow and directx. I new direct show was used I just made the usumption that it fell under the directx specifications.

Well, thanks for the clarification. So what does a programmer do, how many different way is there for a programmer to who is useing the .net framwork to use directshow to do these things? Does one just pray it works? or are there resources available to developers to figure out the manufacturer's implimentation of these things so you can use it properly, and how do you go about getting that information?

I only ask to try to see how people aproach these projects, or is it just a write the code and cross the fingers type thing.