avcap-library

Introduction

The avcap-library is a cross-API, cross-platform simple and easy to use C++ video capture library. It's aim is to provide a unified API for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X to capture video from appropriate hardware. It hides the system specific quirks and issues of different API's used on different systems to access video capture hardware and hopefully helps to write portable capture-applications.

Linux

Under GNU/Linux the avcap-library supports Video4Linux-Devices, Video4Linux2-Devices and AV/C-Devices (e.g. DV-Cams) as capture sources. Note that you need read/write permission to the /dev/video* files to use V4L(2)-Devices. Usually it is sufficient, if the user is a member of the group that owns this files (usually group 'video'). To capture from AV/C-Devices the user needs read/write permission to /dev/raw1394. Membership in the group 'disk' should be sufficient here.

Win32 (Implementation by Robin Luedtke, Nico Pranke)

The Windows-version is basically a class wrapper for the DirectShow API and thus supports only devices with a WDM (Windows driver model) or an old VFW (Video for windows) compliant capture device driver. Understanding the avcap Win32 implementation may be a little difficult because of the following reasons: First, DirectShow is based on the Windows COM (component object model), second, in some cases, DirectShow is a little confusing (e.g. some DirectShow functions have a strange behavior -- workarounds are inevitable). In addition to this, VFW, WDM and even WDM devices itself are handled differently by DirectShow. Third, some important documentation is missing in the DirectShow documentation.

Mac OS X

The implementation for Darwin uses the QuickTime SequenceGrabber-Component and has been tested with the built-in iSight, various USB-cams and DV-Cams.

Building and Installation

See the INSTALL file.

Usage

For an example on how to use the avcap-library take a look at the captest-program and read the documentation of class CaptureDevice to have a good starting point.

Licence

(c) 2005-2008 Nico Pranke <Nico.Pranke@googlemail.com>, Win32 implementation by Robin Luedtke <RobinLu@gmx.de>

For non-commercial use, avcap is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2. Refer to the file "COPYING" for details.

For commercial use, please contact Nico Pranke <Nico.Pranke@googlemail.com> for licensing.


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