Expose my program to other programs

I'm messing with the idea of writing a small program to mirror output of a video capture device. If you buy a video capture device you can only use it with one program at a time because the device gets locked. Instead of buying a second capture card id like to write a program to accept input from my capture device and expose the output to other applications.

Capture Device----->Program---->Flash Media Encoder

I've never done this type of thing before. Is it device driver related? Can I make my program look like a capture device to other programs without digging in device driver dev?

If someone could point me in the right direction that would b开发者_运维技巧e great.

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Can I make my program look like a capture device to other programs without digging in device driver dev?

-No, I'm afraid not. You'd need to do exactly that, write a driver or capture source of your own. You could make some interface to serve up image to multiple apps (what a great idea!) but then it would need to be standardised, and you'd need other companies or developers to use that interface. Again a great idea but you'd need to agree on the feature set - and each developer would likely want something new or different.

(If you are talking about particular/specific other programs, they might have a particular interface you can work with already..)

(I was also assuming you were talking about realtime video capture: if you're talking about photo capture etc, you could write an image file to disk, and then import into the other apps ... not as joined up or integrated as ideal though)

Hope that helps - not an ideal situation though!

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I will not say it is impossible, but I will say it is impossible in C# because this will require you to write a device driver software which can emulate virtual capture devices which your other program can use and your program can capture actual capture device and mirror or split the data to virtual capture devices that your device driver will create.

Very much same to Virtual CD Rom Drives that we can create with some software, you will need windows device driver kit for that.

You can write combination of application, one device driver and you can have some sort of C# api or program to control the operation.