MEDIAPORTAL - free media center

Surely the whole point of WPF, and indeed .Net 3.0, is that it sits on top of DirectX rather than GDI+. Indeed, isn't DirectX now the native graphics architecture for Vista, with GDI simply drawing into a DirectX texture and then being composited onto the screen. Of course and open source WPF would be cool - I'm just puzzled as to why you think WPF doesn't use DirectX?

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Posted by Nick Palmer, on 26-01-2008, , Guest

1. re: WPF not DirectX ?

WPF uses directx but there is no good way to mix WPF and your own DirectX/DirectShow code. The built in stuff in WPF for playing videos (MediaElement) is junk. However there are some workarounds. Personally I just use VMR7 in overlay mode, it works great except the video overlay UI layer can't have a working alpha channel but I can live with that. I guess the MP folks can't.

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Posted by Jacob, on 07-02-2008, , Guest

2. WPF to DirectX integration

You still have alot of DirectX features not available in WPF directly, so there is no way to fully integrate. For example, I would love to be able to apply a pixel shader to an or video, or be able to implement vertex blending animations on the graphics card, or have a live web camera stream rendered easily on a 3D sphere, but there is no easy way of doing that. The integration they provide is only good for creating a HWND or Form over a certain spot in the UI.

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Posted by AlphaAlien, on 13-02-2008, , Guest

3. WPF is unusable in production

After spending some time doing heavy WPF development I've come to the conclusion WPF is unusable outside product demos. It is too slow on every single supported platform 2003, xp, vista. With or without DirectX support. Any non-static content (whole point of wpf) will typically max out any cpu currently on the market.

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