I'm a Linux programmer adventuring on Microsoft territories, and I'm completely lost on where to find documentation for Windows APIs like VFW (Video for Windows).
I'm trying to get a video stream from a webcam (OpenCV is not suitable for me).
I'm looking for a description of functions, data structures, examples, howto's, etc. Searching MSDN for vfw wasn't very helpful.
I wanted to be able to get a video stream from a webcam using Python in Windows. I found this VideoCapture library, but it didn't work in Python 2.6, so I ended up porting his library to Python using ctypes and comtypes called jaraco.video.
It's sparsely documented, but demonstrates how one would access the DirectShow APIs to capture frames from a video stream (and even do some manipulation on it), which as some have mentioned, is the way to go for modern Windows systems.