About Video Capture in DirectShow
[The feature associated with this page, DirectShow, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine, and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation. Those features have been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer, IMFMediaEngine and Audio/Video Capture in Media Foundation instead of DirectShow, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]
The term video capture, as used in this documentation, describes any application where video is received from a hardware device. Video capture devices include not only cameras, but also TV tuner cards, video tape recorders (VTRs), and so forth. The captured video can be saved to disk or previewed live.
This section describes some of the concepts you must understand in order to use DirectShow for video capture:
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