DirectX costs and licence:
There are no costs specifically involved with developing DirectX based software. Indirectly you may have to spend money purchasing other software (such as Microsoft Windows or Visual Studio) but provided you have a legitimate copy of Windows you can download the DirectX SDK completely free of charge.
There are licences that you must agree to upon installing the SDK as well as what you can (and can’t) do with the information contained within it. For the most part there is unlikely to be anything in these agreements that restricts normal use, but it is always worth familiarising yourself with the terms and conditions. Once the SDK is installed you can find the relevant agreements in the %DXSDK_DIR%\Documentation\License Agreements\ folder.
Whilst not specifically related to DirectX (even less so now that DirectShow belongs to the Platform SDK) there are restrictions on the use of MP3 encoded material.
Microsoft holds a licence to include MP3 technologies in their products that you can use via the DirectShow API but it does not imply any rights for anyone else to distribute encoded content. In practical terms this means that you can enable your software to playback MP3 content, but distributing mp3 files with your application might require you to acquire a separate licence. Refer to
mp3licensing.com for more details.
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