ISampleGrabber deprecated?

Question

I have an old computer vision experiment that uses Video for Windows to grab frames from a camera connected to the PC. It's a hack, it uses VfW to create a preview window, then it does a GetDIBits from the window DC.

I'm finally ready to port this to DirectShow. My understanding was that I could grab frames from a video capture graph by using ISampleGrabber, but now I read that ISampleGrabber is deprecated.

What's the non-deprecated way to grab frames from a video feed? Do I have to implement my own DirectShow filter that does essentially what ISampleGrabber does?

Answer 1

DirectShow is not deprecated; just the DirectShow Editing Services. I would strongly recommend using DirectShow because of the much wider level of support, unless there are specific features of MF that are needed.

There's been no development of DES for some years, but the sample grabber is a widely-used filter that is somewhat independent of DES. I would be happy to recommend that you use it. If there is an issue in future versions of windows, it would not be more than a day or two's work to replace the filter.

G

Answer 2

I think Windows Media Foundation would be your best bet if you are only targeting Vista/Win7, otherwise you can still use DirectShow/SampleGrabber approach, I doubt it will be removed any time soon. Related question here.