From: "James Lerch" 
To: "ATM List" 
Reply-To: "James Lerch" 


Hi Bill,

Be careful if you decide to select a new hardware capture platform.  I've
just been educated via the school of hard knocks with a  new Pinnacle DC10+
PCI capture card and WinXP.  The Pinnacle card drivers for XP only support
the Direct Show capture method (no Video for Windows WDM drivers).

The result of the above is the DC10+ card pretty much only works with Pinnacle's
included software.  For instance I can not get the Pinnacle card to work with My
Robo-Foucault, Dale Easton's RTAFTc, or Martin Cibulski's AutoFouc, since
all three of us wrote our code to use the Video for Window's interface.  To
Date I've only gotten it to work with a program called AMCAP.exe, which
uses the MS Direct Show capture method.  Unfortunately I haven't found any
working source code I can use with Direct Show Capture and Visual Basic (my
only programming language at the moment...)

If your NOT looking for new hardware, only some code so you can roll your
own software, try here:

www.shrinkwrapvb.com  Or Here:
http://ej.bantz.com/video/

Take Care,
James Lerch
http://lerch.no-ip.com/atm (My telescope construction,testing, and coating site)

----- Original Message -----
>>From: "Bill T." 

>>Can anybody recommend a good software library, driver, or scam for
>>efficiently grabbing webcam and/or FireWire images from within a Visual
C++
>>or Visual Basic program?  Any information would be appreciated. Of
course,
>>Cheap is Good.

>>My present industrial-refugee, expensive-to-replace video capture system
is
>>getting shakey, so it's time to move on.

>>Bill T.

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