Getting webcam to work in OpenCV 2.3 with Cygwin

Question

I have a problem trying to get a webcam in OpenCV 2.3 to work with Cygwin. I have a Windows 7 64-bit system and I use Notepad++ and cygwin compilers to do my C++ programming. I have seen other posts with similar problems:

Getting Webcam to work in OpenCV

Can't access webcam with OpenCV

I first tried installing OpenCV via the Cygwin Ports. This is rather easy to install, but alas I run into the webcam problem (always returns false when trying to find a device). I have also attempted to build OpenCV and install manually using the command line flavor of CMake. I tried adding the HAVE_VIDEOINPUT and HAVE_DSHOW flags, but no dice. All my programs compile nicely and I have all the functionality of OpenCV aside for this webcam thing.

Has anyone successfully built OpenCV 2.3 on Cygwin with webcam working?

Answer 1

It is unlikely that cygwin build of OpenCV will be able to access a webcam. At least it is not possible without hacking OpenCV cmake scripts. Under cygwin OpenCV build always follows the UNIX branch and videoinput/directshow is excluded from build.