Quick Driver Question: What is VMR?

bh75 · November 14th, 2006, 07:19 AM

First, I would like to say that your driver is amazing, and that you do a wonderful job. Second, I did try to search on this but your search can not handle just three characters like most and I did try to find this on my own first.

As the topic says what is VMR? I see it on your driver under Video Overlay but the only thing it seems to do is remove the Full Screen Video option.

Thanks for the time.

**Regeneration** · November 14th, 2006, 08:46 AM

VMR (Video Mixing Renderer) is related to video playback. It is offering DirectX advanced video rendering, if I’m not mistaking.

squall_leonhart · November 14th, 2006, 11:50 PM

DXVA is Direct X Video Acceleration and allows the hardware to take over for mpeg2 decoding (this is how MPEG2 decoding was done before PureVideo)

VMR disables DXVA and PureVideo, and pushes it through Direct3D

VMR-7 uses Dx7 caps, while VMR-9 uses Dx9 and Shader related caps.

Quote:

Video Renderer vs. VMR7 vs. VMR9

Technical details follow The following section contains technical references and assumes the reader has knowledge of the APIs being discussed. Readers not interested in those details may skip this part.
Case in point to the complexity argument – originally the way to play video was to use the Video Renderer filter. This drew the images using DirectDraw, but could also fall back to Graphics Device Interface (GDI) drawing in some circumstances. One problem with it was limited access to the window: Video for Windows had been plagued with deadlocks caused by applications' incorrect handling of the video window, so in early DirectShow releases, the handle to the playback window was hidden from applications. This of course made it very difficult for sophisticated applications to handle Windows messages, such as WM_SETCURSOR.[6] There was also no reliable way to draw caption text or graphics on top of the video.

Windows XP introduced a new filter called VMR-7[7] (Abbreviation for Video Mixing Renderer 7, sometimes just referred to as plain VMR). The 7 was because VMR-7 only used DirectDraw version 7 to render the video and did not have the option to use GDI drawing. The main new feature of VMR-7 was the ability to mix multiple streams and graphics, so allowing applications to draw text and graphics over the video. VMR7 also featured a "windowless mode"[8] which fixed the problems with access to the window handle; however it required a bit of extra initialization code. For non-technical reasons, it was released only on Windows XP.[9]

DirectX 9 included yet another renderer, dubbed VMR-9.[10] This version depends on DirectX9-style graphics (also known as Direct3D). Unlike the VMR-7, it also would work on any system that supported DirectX9, provided that the graphics adapter could support the required Direct3D modes. However, this caused even further splintering on an already extremely involved API.

Mac Daddy · November 15th, 2006, 02:19 AM

Nice damn post Squall

bh75 · November 15th, 2006, 02:48 AM

Great answer thanks.