March 21, 2008: GraphEditPlus - GraphEdit done right

March 21, 2008

Press Contact: Dmitry Popov
http:/www.thedeemon.com
Author

GraphEditPlus - GraphEdit done right!

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.

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.

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. More information on GraphEditPlus, as well as a free trial copy is available free of charge from http://www.thedeemon.com.

NOTE TO EDITORS: Please, let us know if you have any questions or would like any additional information on GraphEditPlus. Contact Dmitry Popov at press@thedeemon.com for more information. A free registration key is available upon request to all editors considering a review.