Two widely popular applications, which use DirectShow API appeared to be locked in a combat: Google video chat is installing a plugin which registers artificial video capture sources “Google Camera Adapter 0″ and “Google Camera Adapter 1″.

As the application does not announce any integration capabilities and is only using video for internal purposes for in-browser video, the approach with system-wide device registration is, well, questionable.

No need to mention, that devices are not operational: they are giving ERROR_DLL_INIT_FAILED (Error 0x8007045A) as soon as you try to instantiate a filter in a DirectShow video capture enabled application.

In-browser Google Video Chat itself does work and shows video from “real” DirectShow devices, including such artificial as created by IP Video Source tool. Google developers prefer still to take data off the device and as soon as possible leave DirectShow domain, as their graph looks like:

Video Capture Source -> Smart Tee Filter -> Sample Grabber Filter -> Null Renderer Filter

While Google plugin developers might need some interprocess synchronization, as the plugin runs in a child “plugin container” process (plugin-container.exe), introduction of virtual video capture devices is not necessary, but is a plain garbage for the operating system and DirectShow environment.

For some reason, Google developers decided to introduce a special thing: they mirror captured video left-to right when it comes to showing picture capture locally. Well, quite possibly it starts a new era in video conferencing: one will not see a direct copy of video sent remotely, but instead he will be given a mirrored thing.

The curious part is, however, the effect the broken devices introduce to another popular software – Skype.

As Skype is capable of video capturing from a DirectShow device, for video-enabled conferencing, it enumerates the available devices and definitely gets in touch with the aliens from Google planet, which are already known to be broken junk.

The outcome appears to be subject to chances, there are two possible outcomes and only one is such that is more or less good for a user:

• either, Skype shows other available devices and ignores Google adapters (while basically any reasonable DirectShow video capture device would still list those devices – after all they are registered as existing!)
• or, Skype stumbles upon a broken thing, stops enumeration and show no video capture devices available at all! Since Skype does enumeration only once on startup, if it fails to discover devices a user needs to close Skype completely and start it again for another try with video hardware.

It appears that both applications have severe issues.

I envy those who can pass this…

By the way going disabled way was of little help because the audio hint was hardly better recognizible…

It is amazing how it might come that Microsoft Forums‘ RSS feed appears broken on Google Reader with duplicated entries for each of the items.

Regardless of whose the bug is, it seems to me that it is the Microsoft’s one, both are sophisticated applications of a large scale while RSS thing is just nothing in comparison. Was it really difficult to make the darn thing work?

I am curious if Google has a bias against Microsoft websites in search results. It was rather unexpected to see this site first in search for _CONVERSION_DONT_USE_THREAD_LOCALE with following results from connect.microsoft.com and blogs.msdn.com (at least as relevant as I think).

Google Talk offered a marvelous new feature: <iframe> and instant messaging based web chat through Google Talk (Jabber, XMPP) which I immediately put on the sidebar of the website —–>>

Isn’t it just great that Google invests into development of Jabber/XMPP community this way?