The Video Capture Menus

The Video Capture Menus

File:
The File menu allows you to specify the names of the files to use for video and frame captures. You can also exit the capture program here.

capture_filename.gif

Source:
The source device can be selected from those listed under "Source". The various devices are listed with their device number and the name of the corresponding driver's .DLL/module file.

capture_source.gif

Capture:
This section has the commands for capturing frames and videos. A video can be captured by selecting the Capture Video menu item. With Video for Windows, Capturing can be aborted by pressing the ESC key. Capturing can also be stopped by clicking the right mouse button in the capture dialog.

capture_capture.gif

The next entry, Capturing Frames to Video, starts collecting single frames into a video file. The desired frames of the video signal are captured with Capture Frame to Video. Capturing is stopped by selecting Capturing Frames to Video a second time. (Both video capture modes, "continuous" and "single frame", go to the video file.)

Single frames are captured by selecting Capture Frame, they go to the frame file.

Settings
The menu contains entries for dialogs to set up the parameters for capturing frames and video. capture_settings.gif
The capture signal can be viewed by enabling Preview. This is the signal in the frame rate which is set in the toolbar. If the driver of the capture device supports it, the original signal (in the original's frame rate) can be overlaid into the window. This is the recommended option.

With Video for Windows, there are a few dialogs available to manipulate capturing. First, there's the Audio Format, basically to select the quality of the audio capture: sampling frequency, sample size, mono or stereo channels.

The Video Format is a dialog of the drivers for selecting the picture size of the captured frames and video. Video Source gives you access to some picture quality controls such as brightness, contrast, color intensity. Video Display sets other features of the preview/overlay display. Video compression selects one of the video codecs (enCOder/DECoder) available to compress the video frames before writing them into the video file. The list of codecs also appears in Windows' multimedia settings (Advanced -> Video Compression Codecs). And for video settings not handled by other dialogs, there's the Other Video Settings dialog. It contains the maximum of frames to capture into the video file. Audio capturing can be enabled here, and if audio is captured, the synchronization between the audio channel and the video channel can be selected.

When capturing both audio and video, the resulting data are two streams (of sound data and video data,) which can be stored in the video file independently, or they can be selected to be synchronized. This synchronization process can affect either the sampling frequency of the audio capture or the frame rate of the video capture, depending on the driver and device.

Note: Depending on the driver, some or all of these setting dialogs might not be available.