Software motion video implementation under OS/2 has attained sizable performance advantages by enabling video decompressors to directly write to video memory. While this technique provides good performance, it has the disadvantage that each decompressor must deal with the pel format of the display in various modes, clipping the output to visible regions, and any scaling that is to be performed. Additionally, on bank-switched video displays, the decompressor must return on partial frames to enable the video stream handler to switch banks. The direct interface video extensions (DIVE) consolidate the complexities of dealing with direct video frame buffer access (sometimes referred to as "direct access" or "black hole") into a single API DLL that enables efficient transfer to video memory with clipping, scaling, and color space conversion. The optimized screen access functionality provided by DIVE can be used for motion video display, fast image updates for interactive games, and fast screen display by 3-D graphics libraries.