In January 1999 Microsoft released an Application Programming Interface (API) called WebDVD designed to allow rapid development of Enhanced DVD titles featuring playback of DVD content through standard web pages. Microsoft released an updated version of the WebDVD SDK in July of 1999, and then in November of 2000 Microsoft released a new version of DirectShow that included even more features for creating Enhanced DVD titles.
Essentially there are three different methods for creating Enhanced DVD titles using Microsoft's WebDVD API. The first method uses an embedded version of the Windows Media Player. The second method employs an embedded version of an MSWebDVD Object. The final method is to develop custom Visual Basic or C++ programs making direct calls to individual DirectShow functions.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of Microsoft's WebDVD approach is that it is free. Microsoft distributes the WebDVD and DirectX 8.0 Software Developers Kits at no charge, and there are no licensing or royalty charges for using WebDVD or DirectX 8.0. Both the original WebDVD SDK and the latest DirectX SDK make it fairly easy to create interactive HTML pages that can playback content stored on a DVD-Video disc.
The biggest disadvantage of Microsoft's WebDVD approach is that it will only work on Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows Me systems that have Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher as well as a hardware or software DVD decoder that supports DirectShow. While most new Windows systems will support DirectShow, there are still many end users who prefer to use Netscape instead of Internet Explorer as their default web browser. Microsoft's WebDVD API will not work with any of Netscape's browsers, and Netscape has not announced any plans to support WebDVD, or any other embedded COM objects, in the future.
