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Multimedia device interface for retrieving and exploiting software and hardware capabilities
| Details |
Inventors: Engstrom, G. Eric; Eisler, Craig G.;
Assignee: Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA)
Primary Examiner: Oberley; Alvin E.
Assistant Examiner: Courtenay, III; St. John
Attorney, Agent or Firm: Klarquist Sparkman Campbell Leigh & Whinston LLP
In a multimedia API, a method for returning hardware and software capabilities. Multimedia APIs for media devices such as a display device, a sound device and a 3D accelerator each include a function to return the hardware and software capabilities of a particular media device. The hardware capabilities refer to capabilities of a media device such as a display controller, sound device or 3D graphics accelerator, while the software capabilities refer to capabilities of an emulation layer used to emulate functions of a media device. In processing API requests, the multimedia API optimizes the performance of the request by identifying the requested capabilities and determining whether these capabilities are available hardware capabilities. If so, the API instructs the media device to perform the function and passes it the relevant parameters for the request. If not, the API tries to emulate the requested capabilities using the emulation layer. |
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DETAILED DESCRIPTION The invention provides methods for returning software and hardware capabilities in a multimedia API.
The invention further provides methods for optimizing API function calls using available software and hardware capabilities.
Software capabilities refer generally to software emulators associated with a particular media device such as a display device, a 3D graphics accelerator, or a sound device.
Hardware capabilities refer to the capabilities of the actual media device.
One aspect of the invention relates to the support in a multimedia API for returning hardware and software capabilities.
The multimedia API maintains the hardware and software capabilities in capabilities structures associated with a particular media device.
As an optimization, the multimedia API can also maintain the intersection of the software and hardware capabilities.
Applications can request either hardware or software capabilities for a media device by invoking a function to get the capabilities for specified media device and specifying whether software, hardware or both capabilities are to be returned.
In response, the function returns the requested capabilities.
In one implementation, an application requests hardware capabilities by specifying a pointer to a capabilities structure to be filled with the hardware capabilities.
Similarly, to get software emulator capabilities, the application specifies a pointer to a structure to be filled with the software capabilities.
With knowledge of these capabilities, an application can optimize its behavior using available hardware capabilities to enhance performance.
The API includes a number of functions to access media types rendered by the respective media devices.
For example, the display device API includes functions to access and manipulate surface memory holding a pixmap to be drawn on a display device, and palettes to be used to specify the entries in the display device's color table.
These functions can be optimized by the API by identifying the available hardware or software capabilities needed to process a particular API request, and using the available hardware capabilities where possible to process the call
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Cell Phones 
