Please note this is not a Smart Home product! This is software for medical imaging
Play Dicom Video on the Microsoft Windows Platform
Along with the increasing popularity of video recording in medical environments, new challenges have arised. As the video recordings are commonly stored in the PACS, they are made available to viewers via the Dicom protocol, including storage in Dicom format.
Most video players running on Microsoft Windows can’t play Dicom Video Files, as the Dicom File Format includes medical metadata, which prevents recognizing the file as a Media File.
Many video playing applications for the Windows platform make use of the built-in technologies DirectShow or Media Foundation. Both technologies are component-based, in the sense of “separate modules”. in the case of DirectShow, these modules are COM-Objects called Filters. In order to play a media file, specific Filters, each responsible for doing a specific task, need to be Connected to form a Graph. The Graph can then be played: start/stop/pause, seek forward/backward etc.
The idea of DirectShow is that each DirectShow Filter can be developed independently, by different vendors, as long as it adheres to the Microsoft DirectShow specifications. Although DirectShow exists since Windows 95, and Microsoft promotes their newer Media Foundation architecture, it is still the most widely used technology for handling media in Windows.
In order to play a video file, the DirectShow Graph must contain the following Filters:
- File Source, responsible for reading the file and passing the media content to the Stream Splitter
- Stream Splitter, responsible for extracting the Video and Audio data from the stream, and pass the video and audio data toe their respective Decoders
- Video Decoder, responsible for decompressing the video data and delivering the decoded data as Video Frames to the Video Renderer
- Video Renderer, responsible for displaying the Video Frames on the computer screen
and in case the media file contains audio, also:
- Audio Decoder, responsible for decompressing the audio data and delivering the decoded data as Audio Samples to the AudioRenderer
- Audio Renderer, responsible for playing the audio via the computer speakers or headphones
Typically, the Renderer Filters are supplied by Microsoft as part of the Operating System. As each video format uses a different mechanism for compressing and formatting data, those Filters are specific to media formats. Lots of Splitters/Demultiplexer Filters are available all over the Internet, and the same goes for Audio/Video Decoder Filters.
The File Source Filter as available in the Operating System does only read the file data and passes it to the splitter, without any modifications. This works well for files containing media data only, but not for Dicom Files, which contain non-media metadata, too. Our DirectShow filter overcomes this limitation and makes the Dicom Video file playable by any DirectShow-compatible application.
Supported Media Formats
A Dicom Media File may contain several different video and/or audio data, as specified by the Dicom Standard, specified by the following Dicom Transfer Syntaxes:
- 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.100, MPEG2 Main Profile @ Main Level
- 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.101, MPEG2 Main Profile @ High Level
- 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.102, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 High Profile / Level 4.1
- 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.103, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 BD-compatible High Profile / Level 4.1
- 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.104, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 High Profile / Level 4.2 For 2D Video
- 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.105, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 High Profile / Level 4.2 For 3D Video
- 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.106, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Stereo High Profile / Level 4.2
- 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.107, HEVC/H.265 Main Profile / Level 5.1
- 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.108, HEVC/H.265 Main 10 Profile / Level 5.1
As we had testfiles for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 only, we support only the first 4 of the list above. If you have any difficulties playing a dicom video using our Source Filter, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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