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Enumerating Filters

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[The feature associated with this page, DirectShow, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine, and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation. Those features have been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation instead of DirectShow, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

The Filter Graph Manager supports the IFilterGraph::EnumFilters method, which enumerates all the filters in the filter graph. It returns a pointer to the IEnumFilters interface. The IEnumFilters::Next method retrieves IBaseFilter interface pointers.

The following example shows a function that enumerates the filters in a graph and displays a message box with each filter's name. It uses the IBaseFilter::QueryFilterInfo method to retrieve the name of the filter. Note the places where the function calls Release on an interface to decrement the reference count.

HRESULT EnumFilters (IFilterGraph *pGraph) 
{
    IEnumFilters *pEnum = NULL;
    IBaseFilter *pFilter;
    ULONG cFetched;

    HRESULT hr = pGraph->EnumFilters(&pEnum);
    if (FAILED(hr)) return hr;

    while(pEnum->Next(1, &pFilter, &cFetched) == S_OK)
    {
        FILTER_INFO FilterInfo;
        hr = pFilter->QueryFilterInfo(&FilterInfo);
        if (FAILED(hr))
        {
            MessageBox(NULL, TEXT("Could not get the filter info"),
                TEXT("Error"), MB_OK | MB_ICONERROR);
            continue;  // Maybe the next one will work.
        }

#ifdef UNICODE
        MessageBox(NULL, FilterInfo.achName, TEXT("Filter Name"), MB_OK);
#else
        char szName[MAX_FILTER_NAME];
        int cch = WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, 0, FilterInfo.achName,
            MAX_FILTER_NAME, szName, MAX_FILTER_NAME, 0, 0);
        if (cch > 0)
            MessageBox(NULL, szName, TEXT("Filter Name"), MB_OK);
#endif

        // The FILTER_INFO structure holds a pointer to the Filter Graph
        // Manager, with a reference count that must be released.
        if (FilterInfo.pGraph != NULL)
        {
            FilterInfo.pGraph->Release();
        }
        pFilter->Release();
    }

    pEnum->Release();
    return S_OK;
}

Enumerating Objects in a Filter Graph