Capturing Video in Managed Code

Dan Fernandez, Senior Product Manager in the Devloper Group answered a question on our internal list servers this week that I wanted to share because it answers a quesion that I myself have asked recently.

Are there rtesources for capturing video in Managed Code.

The answer is YES !

If you’re running Windows XP, you can use a little-known XP feature called Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) that has a COM library you can program against. This makes capturing either a single frame of a picture or video stream from a USB web cam as easy as 1-2 lines of code.

 

MSDN Windows Image Acquisition docs –

https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wiaaut/wia/wiax/overviews/startpagewiaaut.asp

 

Code Samples:

https://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/wiascriptingdotnet.asp

https://www.codeproject.com/csharp/webcamservice.asp (DirectShow wrapper)

https://www.codeproject.com/csharp/Motion_Detection.asp

https://www.codeproject.com/cs/media/directshownet.asp

 

There is also an open source project to program a webcam across any operating system that may interest you - https://libusb.sourceforge.net/