C++ Winapi - MPEG movies as animated background

Question

MPEG is a really nice format, specially because it really compress the file to unimaginable sizes. A 140Mb raw AVI is now only 4Mb and the quality is still very good. With the Animation Control Windows provides I can play only raw AVI but I would really like to play a MPEG instead, due to the the sizes of the video file.

Now, how would I do that with C++ and WINAPI? Do I have to use some ActiveX components? How do I make sure other users can run my application without being harassed about missing plug-ins/codecs/third-party programs? Can I use the Animation Control someway for displaying the MPEG video? Thanks

Answer 1

I took a look at the MSDN documentation and it looks like you can not use the Animation Control to play MPEG video, you seem to have two choices: 1. DirectShow. 2 The newer Microsoft Media Foundation.

Both choices based on COM (and not ActiveX as I stated earlier).

As for making sure your users can run your application, see this page on Building DirectShow Applications which answers that questions for DirectShow. For Microsoft Media Foundation your users need to be running MS Vista or later.