There is not much theory or documentation on the concepts of streams and samples in Video For Windows API (VFW). I am wondering if a video should only contain:
Or can a video contain multiple video streams (one after the other) and multiple audio streams?
I assume a "sample" just means one frame of the video, not multiple frames. I assume a stream, is a collection of frames or collection of samples. So it would be useful to divide a video into multiple streams (collections of frames) to make multiple "sections", or multiple streams
If you cannot have multiple streams in a video, and this api is only designed to have one video stream per video (with an optional audio stream), how would one create a video composed of multiple sections? Just edit/cut/paste directly into a single stream? Or use a different API such as MediaFoundation/DirectShow instead?
I'm not sure if it's doable via plain VfW but apparently the AVI format does support multiple video streams. I found a thread which has samples from a Fujifilm Finepix Real3D W1 camera with dual video streams:
Duration: 00:00:02.99, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 9676 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 320x240, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 30 tbc
Metadata:
strn : FUJIFILM AVI STREAM 0200
Stream #0.1: Audio: pcm_s16le, 11024 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 352 kb/s
Stream #0.2: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 320x240, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 30 tbc
Metadata:
strn : FUJIFILM AVI STREAM 0200
Posters offered advice on how to split such a video. Among the options were ffmpeg and DirectShow-based software (GraphEdit and GraphStudioNext); I suspect you can use them to create such a video as well.