How to use hardware video scalers?

Question

Modern graphics cards have hardware video scalers, for example as part of AMD Avivo, NVIDIA PureVideo or Intel ClearVideo. For example, AMD\'s Avivo whitepaper says:

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Answer 1

To just access hardware - Direct2D (Direct3D is probably a better choice) is fine. But to access the video scaler you'll need to use DirectShow or Windows Media Foundation (I haven't really used this a lot).

AFAIK - the "Resizer DMO" filter will access the correct hardware and perform the video resize for you. Here is a code sample that uses this filter.

EDIT: If you are using MFTs, the Video Processor Filter also ought to be as efficient. As indicated in the documentation, "The video processor supports GPU-accelerated video processing, using Microsoft Direct3D 11. For more information, see MF_SA_D3D11_AWARE."

Also - see this section on hardware MFT attributes, especially MFT_ENUM_HARDWARE_URL_Attribute that lets you check if that MFT is implemented in hardware or not. Note that DXVA integrates with Media Foundation and exposes its functionality as MFTs. So an MFT that is implemented in hardware is most likely using the underlying hardware and is the method used by Windows itself.

Hope this helps!