DirectShow Capture with delayed play

Question

I'm developing a custom video capture application. The idea is to capture output from a webcam, and simultaneously display a delayed preview.

For instance if a user specifies a delay of 5 minutes, after 5 minutes of video capture the video preview will star playing what was captured 5 minutes ago, and will keep playing until five minutes after capture as stopped.

Building some sort of buffer filter will not work because the user should be able to specify minutes of delay. 5 minutes of buffered video in memory doesn't look like a smart idea.

So I think the best way is to read the same file that is being wirtten by the capture aplication.

Any ideas?

Cheers

Answer 1

Buffering is the only option I can think of for this...but who's to say you can only buffer it in RAM ;).

This is all hypothetical, but you could try using the built in Stream Buffer Engine. It only deals with mpeg2 types, so you may have to send to a mpeg2 encoder before the SBE filters.