WDM drivers(what are they for)

[scotuk1]

what are these because they seem to come up alot.....

[energy80s]

Windows Driver Models are the new style of driver for Windows applications. As far as video capture is concerned, nearly all new hardware will use WDM drivers so you will have to make sure that your software will accept them (ie. VirtualDub won't).

[gll99]

This sounds like a good idea for a topic on this site to organise all the material on this subject. Especially since many capture apps are designed to use these filters and others are not. In addition some can capture AVI while other apps only capture MPEG.

In this context, wdm are a new class of device drivers which communicate with your capture hardware although they can be designed to do other things. Basically you should go to the Microsoft site and read up on Directx and in particular DirectShow Filters. If your not a C++ or advanced VB programmer then look for an app called "graphedit" it allows you to manually access the "ax" drivers on your HD and actually build your own capture app (or many other functions... like a DVD player, audio extractor, de-multiplexor,multiplexor etc... if you have the drivers). You can then save the graph for reuse.



No sense rewriting the specs here on how these drivers are accessed. There are many references on this site as to why you may want to use these drivers (even in win98) instead of Video for windows virtual drivers (vfw) "vxd". Which were designed for Win95 and Win98. The problems with certain apps has also been discussed.

A whole new world just opened up. Have fun!