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Media Foundation (MF) is a COM-based multimedia framework pipeline and infrastructure platform for digital media in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11. It is the intended replacement for Microsoft DirectShow, Windows Media SDK, DirectX Media Objects (DMOs) and all other so-called "legacy" multimedia APIs such as Audio Compression Manager (ACM) and Video for Windows (VfW). The existing DirectShow technology is intended to be replaced by Media Foundation step-by-step, starting with a few features. For some time there will be a co-existence of Media Foundation and DirectShow. Media Foundation will not be available for previous Windows versions, including Windows XP.
The first release, present in Windows Vista, focuses on audio and video playback quality, high-definition content (i.e. HDTV), content protection and a more unified approach for digital data access control for digital rights management (DRM) and its interoperability. It integrates DXVA 2.0 for offloading more of the video processing pipeline to hardware, for better performance. Videos are processed in the colorspace they were encoded in, and are handed off to the hardware, which composes the image in its native colorspace. This prevents intermediate colorspace conversions to improve performance. MF includes a new video renderer, called Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR), which is the next iteration of VMR 7 and 9. EVR has better support for playback timing and synchronization. It uses the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (MMCSS), a new service that prioritizes real time multimedia processing, to reserve the resources required for the playback, without any tearing or glitches.
The second release included in Windows 7 introduces expanded media format support and DXVA HD for acceleration of HD content if WDDM 1.1 drivers are used.[1]