About Video Capture Device Drivers

Video capture device drivers provide low-level video capture services for Windows multimedia applications. These devices can provide services such as the following:

• Single frame video capture
• Real-time (streaming) video capture
• Video overlay
• Capture video frames in a standard or proprietary compressed format

Video capture devices must have a corresponding video capture device driver to be used with Windows. This chapter explains the Windows interface for video capture device drivers. It covers the following topics:

• The different types of video capture channels
• General information about writing a video capture device driver
• How a video capture device driver handles the system messages for the installable driver interface and Plug and Play
• How a video capture device driver handles device specific messages for video capture
• An alphabetical reference to the messages and data structures used to write video capture device drivers

Before reading this chapter, you should be familiar with the video services available with Windows 95. You should also be familiar with the Windows installable driver interface. For information about the video services and the installable driver interface, see the Win32 Programmer's Reference.