ActiveMovie was also released as a free download, either standalone or bundled with a version of Internet Explorer.

In 1996, ActiveMovie was renamed DirectShow.

Version 5.2 of Windows Media Player would remove the ActiveMovie Control icon from the Start Menu upon installation.

In 1995, Microsoft released ActiveMovie with DirectX Media SDK.

When ActiveMovie was installed an option was added to the Start Menu to launch the ActiveMovie Control.

In March 1997, Microsoft announced that ActiveMovie would become part of the DirectX 5 suite of technologies, and around July started referring to it as DirectShow.

The direct predecessor of DirectShow, ActiveMovie (codenamed Quartz), was originally chartered to provide MPEG-1 file playback support for Windows.

Other new features included ActiveMovie multimedia API, HTML Layout Control, Quick Links toolbar, VRML.

Microsoft developed a media player known as ActiveMovie in 1995 that allowed streaming media and included a proprietary streaming format, which was the precursor to the streaming feature later in Windows Media Player 6.4 in 1999.

The EurekaMovies.com site, for example, suggests that a PC with at least a 166-megahertz Pentium processor, or an Apple Macintosh of similar power, can handle video CD's, which can be played with Microsoft's ActiveMovie or Apple's QuickTime.