Taylor: Avoiding Jitter in Composited Frame Display

Absolutely. Windows still uses compositing and all the full DXGI framework for video; it has to in order to offer the kind of modern user experience that we expect. The DRM paths just restrict things so that the CPU can't read back the decoded image buffers on the GPU, and likewise requires that the scanout device be a "secured" path.

Direct3D 11.1 (and DXGI 1.2) expose a lot more control over the whole process, offering a pretty good API for intermixing restricted content playback with programmable general-purpose graphics units. There's plenty of documentation up on MSDN about the new API additions and the overall architecture of their encrypted video playback support, including D3D API and driver changes necessary to support intermixing video playback with shaders and the rest of the GPU. Most of it just boils down to restricting what buffers you can write authenticated video content into and how those buffers are allowed to be accessed.