Video Capture Development VC++ 6

[crazixpaki]

Hey Guys,
I am fairly new to the video capture stuff and couple of general questions about few things and needed some advice finding a decent capture card.

I started looking at Microsoft's DirectShow APIs for capturing video and started with the AmCap application that comes with the DirectX SDK. Using that as a reference I wrote a DLL to perform video capture into raw AVI, which works fine, with some exceptions. The quality of the video when I play it back is a bit shaky, i.e. while playing back you can notice that video is shaking constantly. I am using MS Media Player to playback the file, Any clue as to why that happens? Currently, I am using an old ATI All in wonder 16MB card ( I know its really old, I just wanted to try it before I went ahead and bought something high end)

Now, I am looking to buy a new capture card, that I can use the same DLL for video capturing and possibly add to it capturing the video in a MPEG-2 format possibly to reduce the file size however its not necessary because I am more concerned about the video quality. Any Suggestions, keep in mind that I must use Direct Show APIs to accomplish that or if the card vendor supplies its own API's and they must be MS compatible.
Thanks For Any Help In Advance.

[trossin]

It seems to me that any card that lets you capture raw video will work with the direct show APIs. Even USB web cameras work.

I have a Hauppauge MPEG-2 capture card (PVR-250) it captures using their software fine but when I use DirectShow the device is not listed as one that can capture video. Ulead's tools can not capture from it as well.

This leads me to believe that direct show can not deal with compressed video out of a capture card unless the vendor supplies some filter graph driver.

One thing you could do is post a tiny application using your DLL and ask people to try it on their cards to find out what will and will not work for you.