Step-by-step instructions to set up clean Windows machine to support video in Juce?

Windows
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While researching what framework to use for a large distributed multi screen installation I was testing Juce and it seems to be a very good option.

Compared to Cinder/OF, its commercial backing and thus better documentation and support is appealing, as well as its advanced UI system. The JuceDemo project shows off all features we need, except for the network syncing and probably asymmetric camera frustum tricks that are on our todo list anyway.

However the only thing I couldn’t get to work easily was playback of video on Windows. On Mac the Video Playback demo in the JuceDemo project shows up and works great. But apparently JUCE_DIRECTSHOW is not defined on my Windows system and thus the demo doesn’t show up.

Would it be possible to provide a step-by-step guide to installing the correct codecs and other requirements on a clean Windows 7 or 10 system in order to optimally play a h264 encoded movie with Juce?

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Oh sorry, just noticed that the JUCE demo had an ancient macro in there which prevented it from building the video demo on windows. This is now fixed on the develop branch of JUCE with commit 8b3ab7c.

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Good question.

Interestingly, Windows Media Player (version 12 on Windows 7 at least) can play back MP4 video files with H.264 video out of the box. The “support information for Windows Media Player” lists a few codecs which seem to be related to that:

type | Name              | Format                 | Binary       | Version
....
DMO  | Mpeg4 Decoder DMO | MPG4, mpg4, mp42, MP42 | mpg4decd.dll | 6.1.7601.23403

But attempting to play back an MP4 in Juce results in VFW_E_UNSUPPORTED_STREAM. Not sure why. DMO stands for DirectX Media Object, maybe Microsoft added another interface with Windows 7.

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