I'm a Linux programmer adventuring on Microsoft territories, and I'm completely lost on where to find documentation 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.
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.
According to this Wikipedia article, the last release of VFW was in 1996 for NT4. In other words, this is obsolete technology.
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.