Haali Media Splitter, LAV Filters, AV Splitter...How do these filters work?

[Moontrash]

I was wondering the other night this very question. I'm pretty clueless at what the media splitters/Filters do so I thought I'd post a question on what exactly these little apps do. How do they work? Why do we need them etc?

Do players like MPC HC, PotPlayer, SMplayer, Zoom Player have them built-in?

[jagabo]

I was wondering the other night this very question. I'm pretty clueless at what the media splitters/Filters do so I thought I'd post a question on what exactly these little apps do. How do they work? Why do we need them etc?

Windows doesn't know, for example, an MKV file is an A/V file. An MKV reader gives Windows the ability to recognize that MKV is an A/V file type and read from them. A Splitter is used to split the audio and video (possibly other streams like subtitles, etc.) into separate streams. Sometimes the reader and splitter are included in one filter. Then you need decoders (codecs) to decompress those streams. Finally you need audio and video renderers, the filters that actually send the decompressed audio to the sound card, and the decompressed video to the graphics card.

DirectShow pieces together all these components into a "filter graph" every time you play a video. Here's the graph for playing a VOB file:

Do players like MPC HC, PotPlayer, SMplayer, Zoom Player have them built-in?

Some players have built in readers, splitters, and decoders. Some you can set to use the internal filters or use the installed DirectShow filters.

[Moontrash]

excellent explanation jagabo...very "101"and easy to understand

what makes these seprate Filters/Splitters any better than the other?...i.e...will Haali be any better than LAV and vice versa?...do they have the same basic compenents built in or are they different?

[jagabo]

Different reader/splitter packages may handle different file types. I've Haali for years. I'm aware of LAV but I've never used it. Microsoft often changes the A/V specifications to add features like support of interlaced video and hardware MPEG 2 and h.264 decoding. Different readers/splitters (and players) may lag in support for those features. And different software has different bugs. Basically, use what works for you.