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Multimedia Technologies

Microsoft® Windows® CE .NET brings the high-performance Microsoft DirectX® and multimedia technologies found on desktop PCs to embedded devices. Windows CE supports audio technologies, graphics technologies, and media support technologies.

DirectX is an umbrella term for a group of Component Object Model (COM)-based multimedia technologies that provide low-level access to audio and video hardware in a device-independent manner. By using a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and a hardware emulation layer (HEL), DirectX delivers a consistent set of capabilities across a variety of hardware configurations, while minimizing latency and maximizing hardware performance.

Microsoft Windows Media® technologies are designed to provide audio and video playback support to your platform for a wide variety of streaming and non-streaming media formats. The Windows Media Player control allows you to add playback support to web pages or other applications.

The following multimedia technologies are supported in Windows CE .NET:

  • Microsoft Direct3D
  • DVD-Video API
  • Windows Media audio and video codecs
  • A new unified audio model that uses waveform audio drivers for waveform audio, the audio mixer, and DirectSound

Windows CE .NET supports the following multimedia technologies introduced in prior releases of Windows CE:

Except for Direct3D, which required floating point support, all multimedia components are supported on all Windows CE .NET CPUs.

See Also

About Windows CE .NET

Last updated on Wednesday, April 13, 2005

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