[FFmpeg-devel] Notes about avdevice

[Don Moir]

I am looking at camera support.

This is for a windows app and I could use dshow directly or use avdevice.

My preference I think is to use avdevice but I ran into some issues.

avdevice worked right off and I was able to set the camera resolution etc.

There are a few downsides to it though.

1) avdevice has dependencies on avfilter and swresample. I have no need for either of these and this is unfortunate. It doesn't appear that these dependencies can be turned off.

2) I can set the av options to list_devices and it goes to stdout. This is pretty useless in a GUI app.

3) I would also need to find the various resolutions for a particular camera and that might be in place, I don't know but I assume if it was it would also goto stdout and thats useless.

So to do some testing, I got the camera list and supported resolutions from dshow directly and then used avdevice to do the display which worked fine.

Since I am having to use dshow already for some of it, it seems I should just go ahead and use dshow for all of it.

So downside for avdevice for me are dependencies on avfilter and swresample and weak ability to retrieve device information.