Video for Windows was a multimedia framework

Multimedia framework

A multimedia framework is a software framework that handles media on a computer and through a network. A good multimedia framework offers an intuitive API and a modular architecture to easily add support for new audio, video and container formats and transmission protocols...

 developed by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 that allowed Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 to play digital video

Digital video

Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...

.

Overview

Video for Windows was first introduced in November 1992. Video for Windows was developed as a reaction to Apple Computer

Apple Computer

Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

's QuickTime

QuickTime

QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...

 technology, which added digital video to the Macintosh platform. Costing around $200, the software included editing and encoding programs for use with video input boards. A runtime version for viewing videos only was also made available. Originally released as a free add-on to Windows 3.1

Windows 3.1x

Windows 3.1x is a series of 16-bit operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The series began with Windows 3.1, which was first sold during March 1992 as a successor to Windows 3.0...

 and Windows 3.11, it then became an integral component of Windows 95

Windows 95

Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...

 and later.
Like QuickTime there were three components in Video for Windows. The technology introduced a file format designed to store digital video, Audio Video Interleave

Audio Video Interleave

Audio Video Interleave , known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback...

 (AVI). The technology provided an application programming interface

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

 that allowed software developer

Software developer

A software developer is a person concerned with facets of the software development process. Their work includes researching, designing, developing, and testing software. A software developer may take part in design, computer programming, or software project management...

s working on the Windows platform to add the ability to play or manipulate digital video

Digital video

Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...

 to their own applications. Lastly, it included a suite of software for playing and manipulating digital video:

• Media Player
• VidCap
• VidEdit
• BitEdit
• PalEdit
• WaveEdit

The original version had a number of limitations including a maximum resolution of 320 pixels by 240 pixels and a maximum framerate of 30 frames per second.

The Video for Windows technology was mostly replaced by the July 1996 release of its COM

Component Object Model

Component Object Model is a binary-interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in a large range of programming languages...

-based successor - ActiveMovie

ActiveMovie

ActiveMovie is a streaming media technology now known as DirectShow, developed by Microsoft to replace Video for Windows. ActiveMovie allows users to view media streams, whether distributed via the Internet, an intranet and CD-ROMs....

 - first released as a beta version along with the second beta of Internet Explorer 3.0. ActiveMovie was also released as a free download, either standalone or bundled with a version of Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

. One component that was not replaced with ActiveMovie was video capture, which still required an install of Video for Windows until the release of WDM

Windows Driver Model

In computing, the Windows Driver Model — also known at one point as the Win32 Driver Model — is a framework for device drivers that was introduced with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to replace VxD, which was used on older versions of Windows such as Windows 95 and Windows 3.1, as well...

 capture drivers, which only started to become popular in 2000.

In 1995 Video for Windows became an issue in a lawsuit Apple filed

San Francisco Canyon Company

San Francisco Canyon Company was a software developer company that was contracted by Apple Computer in 1992 to port the QuickTime technology to Microsoft Windows...

 against Microsoft, Intel, and the San Francisco Canyon Company

San Francisco Canyon Company

San Francisco Canyon Company was a software developer company that was contracted by Apple Computer in 1992 to port the QuickTime technology to Microsoft Windows...

, regarding the alleged theft of several thousand lines of QuickTime

QuickTime

QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...

 source code to improve the performance of Video for Windows. This lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1997, when Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser over Netscape, and Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock.

In March 1997, Microsoft announced that ActiveMovie would become part of the DirectX 5

DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...

 suite of technologies, and around July started referring to it as DirectShow

DirectShow

DirectShow , codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows technology...

.

Version history

Release Date	Version	Notes
November 1992	Video for Windows 1.0	First public release. Including Microsoft's RLE Run-length encoding Run-length encoding is a very simple form of data compression in which runs of data are stored as a single data value and count, rather than as the original run...  and Video1 Video1 Microsoft Video 1 or MS-CRAM is an early video compression and decompression algorithm that was released with version 1.0 of Microsoft's Video for Windows in November 1992...  codecs.
	Video for Windows 1.1	Added Cinepak Cinepak Cinepak is a video codec developed by Peter Barrett at SuperMac Technologies, and released in 1991 with the Video Spigot, and then in 1992 as part of Apple Computer's QuickTime video suite. It was designed to encode 320x240 resolution video at 1x CD-ROM transfer rates. The codec was ported to the...  codec
	Video for Windows 1.1a
	Video for Windows 1.1b
	Video for Windows 1.1c
	Video for Windows 1.1d	Included Indeo Indeo Indeo Video is a video codec developed by Intel in 1992. It was sold to Ligos Corporation in 2000. While its original version was related to Intel's DVI video stream format, a hardware-only codec for the compression of television-quality video onto compact disks, Indeo was distinguished by being...  3.2 (Allegedly included source code from Apple's QuickTime for Windows)
March 1995	Video for Windows 1.1e	Last version for Windows 3.1x
August 1995	Video for Windows 95	Bundled with Windows 95
July 1996	Video for Windows NT	32-bit version bundled with Windows NT 4.0
July 1996	ActiveMovie 1.0	The successor to Video for Windows. Added support for MPEG-1 MPEG-1 MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to 1.5 Mbit/s without excessive quality loss, making video CDs, digital cable/satellite TV and digital audio broadcasting possible.Today, MPEG-1 has become... and QuickTime file formats
March 1997	DirectShow 1.0	The successor to Active Movie.

Example

This sample source code shows skeleton of video codec in VfW:

1. include

…
LRESULT WINAPI DriverProc(
DWORD dwDriverId,
HDRVR hdrvr,
UINT msg,
LONG lParam1,
LONG lParam2)
{
switch(msg)
{
…
case ICM_COMPRESS:
// compress frame
return Compress((ICCOMPRESS*)lParam1, (DWORD)lParam2);
…
case ICM_DECOMPRESS:
// decompress frame
return Decompress((ICDECOMPRESS*)lParam1, (DWORD)lParam2);
…
}
}
…