Whats the best and easiest way to play an incoming live video stream in a c++ windows application (visual studio 2010) and write some notes (eg. this is a blue ball) on the stream display? ActiveX? DirectX? Flash?
I have Windows SDK 7.1 installed. Do I need to install any other software?
Appreciate any pointers.
In simplest, you can do everything you ask with just directshow. There is directshow.net managed library that wraps it for you.
So - try to find an example that just gets video from capture device to the renderer. Then, insert SampleGrabber filter in between those, and modify frame data accordingly. I am using such technique to draw timestamp on the recorded video in my recorder, I am even drawing it with simple GDI+ calls.
Thing to consider: you'll have to watch out for PICTURE format - some webcams have YUY2 as default or ONLY format. You'll want RGB24 format to be able to wrap Bitmap then Graphics around it.
