Alternatives to DirectShow for video capture on Windows

Question

I am looking at updating a program that currently uses DirectShow for video capture. While DirectShow seems to work well, I was wondering if there were any more powerful or up to date SDKs or APIs that I should look into. Some features that would be helpful would be ones that will:

1. Provide a consistent framerate (33ms between frames for NTSC) during capture.
2. Work with DirectShow compatible capture devices.
3. Not require an extra license to be installed on the customer's PC.
4. Allow for simultaneous preview and hardware encoding of video.
5. Be able to be integrated into a C++/MFC application.

I've looked into LeadTools Multimedia Capture SDK and VisioForge Capture SDK and Microsoft Media Foundation, but just wanted to know what others have used successfully before I invest time or money into one of these alternatives. I don't care if this is a commercial or open source product.

EDIT: While I appreciate the attempts to solve my particular problem, this question was supposed to be about alternatives to DirectShow. So, I removed all of the references to my specific problem. Solving that will need to wait for another question.

Answer 1

The problem might just be the method you are using for timing. Are you using the high performance timer API?

Answer 2

Quite all capture boards come with their own timers.

You may try to query you source filter for IReferenceClock and use its own timer that is usually more accurate than a PC's one.

If you use ISampleGrabber then the callback function is called microseconds from the moment Receive is called on the Sample Grabber's input pin, they're just few lines away in the source code.

It seems that your frame source timing is inaccurate (not the timing set in IMediaSample, but actial timing the frames are delivered in).

What is the source filter that produces the frames?

Answer 3

VideoLan may be an option for you.

Answer 4

The DirectShow API is very good, I've never found better on the windows platform. DirectShow has been superseded by Media Foundation, which is Vista (and later) operating systems only.

We'll have to wait for XP to die before people will start mass development using Media Foundation...

May I ask why you're seeking an alternative to DirectShow - it's a very well supported API - well documented on MSDN and there's a very active and friendly forum on MSDN for DirectShow Development.