Where to find documentation for vfw.h? [closed]

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I'm a Linux programmer adventuring on Microsoft territories, and I'm completely lost on where to find documenta开发者_如何学JAVAtion for Windows APIs like VFW (Video for Windows).

I'm trying to get a video stream from a webcam (OpenCV is not suitable for me).

I'm looking for a description of functions, data structures, examples, howto's, etc. Searching MSDN for vfw wasn't very helpful.

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According to this Wikipedia article, the last release of VFW was in 1996 for NT4. In other words, this is obsolete technology.

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I wanted to be able to get a video stream from a webcam using Python in Windows. I found this VideoCapture library, but it didn't work in Python 2.6, so I ended up porting his library to Python using ctypes and comtypes called jaraco.video.

It's sparsely documented, but demonstrates how one would access the DirectShow APIs to capture frames from a video stream (and even do some manipulation on it), which as some have mentioned, is the way to go for modern Windows systems.

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That would probably because Video for Windows is deprecated for some time now. It has been replaced with DirectShow libraries, which handle the video capture and encoding tasks.

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I found some documentation in msdn about it : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms713492(v=vs.85).aspx