Getting Started


This section contains the following topics.

What is DirectAnimation?

Microsoft® DirectX® media is a family of high-level APIs and controls for multimedia that provide rich support for animation, streaming, and integration of the different media types. Microsoft DirectAnimation™ is the component of DirectX media that provides rich animation of Web pages and strong integration with Dynamic HTML. DirectAnimation is a COM API and an underlying run time whose functionality can be accessed in different ways by different user groups. HTML authors can integrate multimedia using the DirectAnimation controls. HTML pages can be enriched using Microsoft Visual Basic®, Scripting Edition (VBScript) and JScript™. VBScript, JScript, and Java™ applet writers can program rich animation for web pages. Finally, Java, Visual Basic, and C++ application programmers can develop ActiveX™ controls or full applications. Thus, DirectAnimation provides a multimedia API and run time that scales from the HTML author to the C++ programmer.

The DirectAnimation SDK provides documentation, samples, and tutorials to help users get up and running with DirectAnimation.

DirectAnimation is implemented using the DirectX foundation API and DirectShow™. For a guide on where to find out about particular DirectShow features, see the DirectShow Documentation Roadmap. For more information about the DirectX foundation components, see http://www.microsoft.com/directx.

Key features of the DirectAnimation API are:

DirectAnimation provides services that make it easy to build high-performance animation from a variety of environments, such as HTML, VBScript and JScript, Java, and Microsoft Visual C++®. Components include ActiveX controls for HTML environments and a COM-based animation library accessible from any programming or scripting language.

A set of multimedia run-time controls supply a scripting interface to some of the DirectAnimation API functions and libraries. These controls (formerly called Multimedia DHTML controls) allow you to deliver impressive animation, image, and sound content over the Web with low code overhead.

The DirectAnimation control documentation consists of the following:

The following diagram shows the DirectAnimation architecture. The ActiveMovie control provides an interface to some of the DirectShow API functions. The multimedia controls provide an interface to some of the DirectAnimation library, which is also accessible directly. The DirectAnimation library in turn uses the DirectShow API, the DirectX foundation, and certain operating-system services. SG stands for Structured Graphics control and Seq stands for the Sequencer control.

DirectAnimation Architecture

Who Should Use DirectAnimation?

Who should use DirectAnimation? Like other system services such as window management or client/server frameworks, DirectAnimation's functionality supports a number of applications. This documentation focuses on Internet applications.

The multimedia authoring community includes people skilled in a variety of disciplines. From graphics system programmers to creative professionals, Web developers come from many backgrounds and bring as many approaches to the task of producing multimedia for the Web.

Web multimedia developers can be grouped by the tools they use:
Developers Tools
Creative professionals Painting software, scanners, cameras, image editing software, sound editors
Website builders Authoring tools for HTML (Microsoft FrontPage®, for example)
Script writers JScript, VBScript, HTML source
Application developers C, C++, Visual Basic, Java, SQL, Active Server, CGI scripts
Graphics systems programmers Low-level languages (C, C++) and graphics APIs

DirectAnimation serves each of these developers. The multimedia client controls are the quickest approach for common applications such as sprite sequences or line drawing. The scripting interface for JScript and VBScript adds many animation features in a simple, high-level way. Finally, Java or C++ (or any other COM-enabled language) can be used to access the media and animation library with the full power of an object-oriented, compiled language.

The following table shows the typical ways different developers would access DirectAnimation.
Developers Access DirectAnimation through...
Creative professionals DirectAnimation Client Controls
Website builders DirectAnimation Client Controls, DirectAnimation scripting
Script writers DirectAnimation scripting, DirectAnimation for Java
Application developers DirectAnimation for Java, DirectAnimation scripting
Graphics systems programmers DirectAnimation through native COM, DirectX foundation, and DirectShow

What Do You Need to Use DirectAnimation?

Internet Explorer 4.0 contains all the software necessary to view multimedia created with DirectAnimation.

To create presentations with DirectAnimation, you need the following:

You can access DirectAnimation from JScript, VBScript, Visual Basic, and C++ through the scripting (COM) interfaces directly. Or, you can add DirectAnimation content to your Web pages by using the DirectAnimation controls and setting parameters on these controls; that is, without programming at all. See the DirectAnimation Controls section for more details. Using the DirectAnimation controls directly, or using JScript or VBScript allows you to describe inline animations with HTML. Such animations can integrate with Dynamic HTML by being windowless on the page (overlaying other elements such as text) or by driving the properties of other entities on the page. It is also possible to import HTML rendered text and use it as a texture in an animation.

There is a special Java binding for DirectAnimation provided on top of the COM API that takes advantage of specific Java features. For example, operations are overloaded, so that several COM methods that perform similar functions but use different parameter types are given the same name in Java.

How Can You Use DirectAnimation?

You can use DirectAnimation in the following ways:

The DirectAnimation SDK

The DirectAnimation SDK includes a wide variety of samples to illustrate using DirectAnimation from the different host languages. For each host language there are three categories of samples, as follows:

Documentation Roadmap

The DirectAnimation documentation is divided into several sections. To help you find the information you need, the following list describes the content of each section and when you will typically use it.

The DirectAnimation documentation does not include material on how to program in Java, C/C++, or Visual Basic. Consult the appropriate programming documentation for this information.

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