Microsoft Windows Video Capture

Video capture in Microsoft Windows has undergone two primary periods of evolution.

Video for Windows(VFW) was introduced in the Fall of 1992. Early drivers captured only in RGB formats, but support for YUV and compressed formats followed soon thereafter.

With Windows95, improvements were made to support capturing to AVI files directly from hardware buffers, resulting in no copy operations for optimal efficiency.

Vidcap was the original VFW capture application, and the source code shipped in Win32 SDKs. AVICap and AVICap32 are DLLs which contain the capture engine used by most VFW applications.

WDM video capture was introduced with Windows98 and Win2K to support USB and 1394 video devices as well as analog capture cards with digital and analog TV tuners. WDM corrects the many deficiencies of the VFW model.

Here are free downloads of a few Direct Show filters which may prove useful in debugging capture and other types of graphs.

Show Clock filter which displays the stream time of a graph .

Stream Scope filter which displays the metadata contents of  Media Samples for a given stream.

VBI Scope filter which displays an oscilloscope view of a VBI stream.