DirectShow vs. Media Foundation for video capture?

windows directshow ms-media-foundation
Roddy picture Roddy · Dec 10, 2010 · Viewed 9k times · Source

I'm trying to choose between these two APIs for a Video Capture/Monitoring/Streaming application, and I'm not sure which is going to be the best bet.

A bit of background:

  • I need it to work with a wide range of video capture cards/dongles.
  • The app will likely be developed in C++ so a native API is essential
  • Performance is important, as I need to handle multiple video streams

A bit of googling has given me the impression that

  • MF only supports video capture on Win 7
  • Directshow is better supported , but will become obsolete
  • MF can offer better performance in some applications

MF feels a better bet going forwards, but I'm concerned about ending up in a technological dead-end if MF doesn't 'catch on' and Directshow remains the API of choice. Suggestions and advice, please...

Answer

Dee Mon picture Dee Mon · Dec 13, 2010

Whatever marketers from MS say, DirectShow is here to stay. Too many applications use it, so MS will support it forever, just as all other COM-based technologies. And since DirectShow has much more features and is native for C++ programming, I suggest sticking with it.

Related questions

Virtual webcam input as byte stream

I dont have webcam. And I want to implement virtual webcam (or fake device driver may be) that would work as normal webcam(virtual webcam) and takes memory stream or bytes as input. How can I develop this? Can DirectShow …

Read More
DirectShow: webcam preview and image capture

After looking at a very similar question and seeing almost identical code, I've decided to ask this question separately. I want to show a video preview of the webcam's video stream to the default window DirectShow uses, and I also …

Read More
How can you find out which process is listening on a port on Windows?

How can you find out which process is listening on a port on Windows?

Read More