DirectX Foundation handles the low-level functions. The DirectX Media layer sits on top of DirectX Foundation and provides high-level services that support animation, media streaming (transmission and viewing of audio and video as it downloads over the Internet), and interactivity. Like DirectX Foundation, DirectX Media is made up of several integrated components. These components include Microsoft DirectShow, DirectAnimation, Direct3D Retained Mode, and Microsoft DirectPlay. Support for DirectShow and DirectAnimation is built into the latest versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Support for VRML is also provided in DirectX Media. What do they do?
DirectShow - Microsoft DirectShow (formerly called Microsoft ActiveMovie) is a media-streaming architecture for the Microsoft Windows platform that enables the high-quality capture and playback of multimedia streams.
DirectAnimation - DirectAnimation provides unified, comprehensive support for animation, streaming, and integration of diverse media types, such as 2-D vector graphics, 3-D graphics, sprites, audio, and video.
Direct3D Retained Mode - Direct3D Retained Mode is a high-level 3D scene graph manager that simplifies the building and animation of 3D worlds and data.
DirectPlay - DirectPlay makes it easy to connect games over the Internet, a modem link, or a network. Direct Play is a software interface that simplifies application access to communication services.
