Dee Mon announces GraphEditPlus - a must-have tool for DirectShow
developers which allows you to have maximum information and maximum
control of every detail in your graphs. GraphEditPlus will even
generate source code for you in C++ or C#.
The most popular
way to build multimedia applications for Windows is to use DirectShow -
a media-streaming architecture and API from Microsoft which simplifies
media playback, format conversion, and capture tasks. In DirectShow all
devices (camera, sound card, video renderer etc.), codecs, file
readers/writers, parsers, muxers and other logical units are presented
in a form of filters. Filters expose pins capable of receiving or
sending media data, filters connect to each other with their pins and
form directed graphs. Applications build the graphs they need by
instantiating necessary filters as COM objects and connecting them.
Microsoft
provides developers with a tool named GraphEdit which allows you to see
list of available filters, create a graph and run it. This tool can
reduce development time significantly because the programmer can
experiment with different filters and their combinations without
writing graph building code for each graph he/she tries. However MS
GraphEdit shows only very limited amount of information about the
filters, their pins and data going through the graph. In many cases
information provided by MS GraphEdit is not enough to understand why
some filters refuse to connect or how to build desired graph. And even
in case you've successfully built your graph in MS GraphEdit, you still
need to write all the tedious code of building that graph in your
application.
GraphEditPlus changes the situation drastically
It
has all the features of original MS GraphEdit, but provides much more
information about all the filters, pins and connections which is
crucial in many cases. The chances and the speed of creating a graph
that does the work you need increase dramatically. And after creating
the graph in GraphEditPlus you don't need to spend a day recreating the
graph building steps in your code. GraphEditPlus will generate full
source code in C++ or C# of a working application that creates your
graph and runs it. This can increase your productivity by an order of
magnitude.
GraphEditPlus has dozens of features missing in MS
GraphEdit. You can edit several graphs simultaneously. You can see
event log (messages filters send to your application). For each filter
and pin you can see what DirectShow interfaces it supports. And for
each supported interface you'll see its definition, so it's easy to
understand how to operate with this filter from your app. At each
moment you'll see the state of each filter, which is crucial when some
of the filters refuse to start and you don't know which. While
debugging your application you can open the graph created by your app
at runtime and see IUnknown addresses of all filters among all the
other important information.
While editing a graph in
GraphEditPlus you have full information about every mediatype including
all the fields of structures like VIDEOINFOHEADER, BITMAPINFOHEADER and
others in proper forms (decimal, hexadecimal, text). For output pins
you can see list of filters they can be connected to in the order in
which DirectShow will try them when rendering. You can easily insert
filters to the graph from that list. For every pin where it's possible
you can see its memory allocator properties and requirements.
In
GraphEditPlus not only can you build and run the graphs but also watch
data go through the graph. If you insert a Sample Grabber filter, you
can see in a separate window information about every media sample went
through the filter. Each sample is timestamped so you can see which
filter is the bottleneck in a sequence of filters.
Generate Source Code
For each
graph you make GraphEditPlus can generate source code of an application
that builds and runs this graph. The code can be either in C++ (using
COM with smart pointers) or C# (using DirectShowLib). Although
GraphEditPlus itself requires .NET Framework 2.0, generated C++ code does not require .NET
and can be built with any C++ compiler. The source code generation can
be customized to fit your style by editing code templates.
GraphEditPlus contains code template editor which shows you results of
template substitution as you type.
User Interface
GraphEditPlus user
interface is also much more convenient and friendly than original MS
GraphEdit's one. With context menu it's so easy and fast to render
files and URLs, insert source filters, save and load graphs, render
pins and perform many other operations. Categorized list of registered
filters is always near and ready for action. For each filter in your
system you can see all information about its file including its
location, version, modification date, vendor etc. When it comes to VfW
codecs you'll see actual codec files, not the wrapper. You can edit
filters' merits, register new filters and unregister others. If you
develop your own filters, this will save you a lot of time.
Developing
applications with DirectShow is not an easy task, but having a right
tool like GraphEditPlus can eliminate a big part of complexity and
pain, significantly reducing development time and costs.
Pricing and Availability
GraphEditPlus
runs under all versions of Microsoft Windows and costs $59,90 (USD) for
a single-user license, $49,90 for 2-4 users and down to $29,90 for 10+
users.
It requires Microsoft .NET
Framework 2.0 which most Windows developers already have installed.
Licensed customers are entitled to the fully-functional version of the
product, free technical support and free upgrades.
Informations and Free Trial
More information on
GraphEditPlus, as well as a free trial copy is available free of charge
from http://www.thedeemon.com.
Product page: http://www.thedeemon.com/GraphEditPlus/
Direct download link: http://www.thedeemon.com/GraphEditPlus/GraphEditPlusSetup.exe (0.4 MB)
Company web-site: www.thedeemon.com