General question about DirectShow.NET, DirectShow and Windows Media Format

I searched and googled for an answer but couldn't find one.

Basically I'm developing a webcam/audio streaming application which should capture audio and video from a pc (usb webcam/microphone) and send them to a receiving server. What the server will do with that it's another story and phase two (which I'm skipping for now)

I wrote some code using DirectShow and Windows Media Format and it worked great for capture audio/video and sending them to another client, but there's a major problem: latency.

Everywhere in the inte开发者_运维知识库rnet everyone gave me the same answer: "sorry dude but media format isn't for video conferencing, their codecs have too high latency". I thought I could skip the .wmv problems but seems like it's not possible to do... this road ends here then.

So I saw a few examples with DirectShow.NET which were faster for both audio and video.. my question is: how come that DirectShow.NET is faster and better for video/audio conferencing? Shouldn't it be just a .NET porting of C++'s DirectShow?

Am I missing something? I'm a bit confused at this point

Yes, DirectShow.NET is just a port providing managed mappings for the unmanaged DirectShow. Windows Media is indeed not ideal for low latency, but you can somewhat mitigate by choosing the right codec/profile, i.e. Low Delay CBR and settings. In the end though it depends on the consumer (Windows Media Player mostly, Silverlight is better) how much content is buffered before displaying a frame.

To cut a long story short limitations are the same for DirectShow.NET and DirectShow and I doubt you'll get below 2 seconds latency using Windows Media.