This does not seem to be documented anywhere, so it makes sense to mention. A video decoder, wrapped by DMO Wrapper Filter, will receive preroll media samples with AM_SAMPLE_PREROLL flag (alternatively available using IMediaSample::IsPreroll), but it won’t even forward these samples to the underlying DMO, instead they are just ignored.
MSDN says:
Preroll samples are processed but not displayed. They are located in the media stream before the displayable samples.
However this behavoir of DMO Wrapper Filter does not seem to be correct. A DMO might require (in my case, maybe there are other scenarios) to initialize its decoding context from a splice point and then be able to decode further samples. The way the wrapper is skipping samples it appears that DMO is not receiving splice point data and won’t be able to start decoding of non-preroll samples until it receives a non-preroll splice point media sample…