http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/video_capture.aspx?display=Print

Introduction

I looked around for a project capturing incoming video from external video devices to memory buffer for image processing applications and could not find the one I needed. The existing articles on The Code Project, An Easy Video Processing Framework by Grabbing Frames as Bitmaps using DirectShow, CAviCap and CFrameGrabber - Wrappers for AVICap Window, Real-time Video Image Processing / Frame Grabber using a Minimalistic Approach, Simultaneous Previewing & Video Capture using DirectShow do not provide the preferred buffering mode for capturing raw data from the stream. Some of them were tested only on WinXP and Windows 2000, pretty outdated, the latest one goes back to 1999 or captures samples from video files and so on.

I have Vista on my computer and installed Windows SDK for Vista and DirectX SDK 2007. Now Direct Show is a part of Windows SDK and if you want to use ISampleGrabber for raw data capture, you need to install DirectX SDK too. I developed a simple MFC application supporting enumeration of existing video devices, preview of the video stream, capture raw image data in buffered mode with the desired frame rate, display it to the window with GDI+, taking snap shots to JPEG files. With that application as a skeleton, you can easily start with image/video processing tasks (video codecs development, motion estimation, edge detection). I use that one in my face detection program I'm going to post later.