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Home/ Questions/Q 6619427
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Editorial Team
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Editorial Team
Asked: May 25, 20262026-05-25T20:57:57+00:00 2026-05-25T20:57:57+00:00

Is there any way to capture frames from as many camera types as DirectShow

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Is there any way to capture frames from as many camera types as DirectShow do on Windows platform using Libav? I need to capture a camera output without using DirectShow filters and I want my application to work with many camera devices types.

I have searched the Internet about this capability of libav and found that it can be done via libav using special input format “vfwcap”. Something like that (don’t sure about code correctness – I wrote it by myself):

AVFormatParameters formatParams = NULL;
AVInputFormat* pInfmt = NULL;
pInFormatCtx*  pInFormatCtx = NULL;

av_register_all();

//formatParams.device = NULL; //this was probably deprecated and then removed
formatParams.channel = 0;
formatParams.standard = "ntsc"; //deprecated too but still available
formatParams.width = 640;
formatParams.height = 480;
formatParams.time_base.num = 1000;
formatParams.time_base.den = 30000; //so we want 30000/1000 = 30 frames per second
formatParams.prealloced_context = 0;


pInfmt = av_find_input_format("vfwcap");
if( !pInfmt )
{
  fprintf(stderr,"Unknown input format\n");
  return -1;
}

// Open video file (formatParams can be NULL for autodetecting probably)
if (av_open_input_file(&pInFormatCtx, 0, pInfmt, 0, formatParams) < 0)
   return -1; // Couldn't open device

/* Same as video4linux code*/

So another question is: how many devices are supported by Libav? All I have found about capture cameras output with libav on windows is advice to use DirectShow for this purpose because libav supports too few devices. Maybe situation has already changed now and it does support enough devices to use it in production applications?

If this isn’t possible.. Well I hope my question won’t be useless and this composed from different sources piece of code will help someone interested in this theme ‘coz there are really too few information about it in the whole internet.

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1 Answer

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  1. Editorial Team
    Editorial Team
    2026-05-25T20:57:58+00:00Added an answer on May 25, 2026 at 8:57 pm

    FFMPEG cannot capture video on Windows. Once I had to implement this myself, using DirectShow capturing

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