@ctiVideo supports any Video-for-Windows (VfW) compatible video device. If you can see the video-capture device listed in the Multimedia section of the system control panel, @ctiVideo will initialize it and will use it for video manipulation... In case you are not sure if your camera, TV card or parallel port capture device are compatible with VfW, follow the following procedure:

• Go to Start button/Settings/Control Panel
• Double-click the Multimedia Icon
• Select the Devices tab
• Expand the Video Capture Devices section
• If your capture device is listed in the section, it will be available for use with @ctiVideo

Our experience shows, that all the low-price capture devices, based on Bt848 chipset come with Windows 95/98 AND WinNT/2000 VfW drivers. All the rest of the boards/cameras we dealt with (and believe us, this is a long list... :) usually come with more or less functional driver for Win95/98. Unfortunately, some of them don't have WinNT/2000 drivers...

One almost 100% sure way to check if your capture device is VfW compatible: If it works with MS NetMeeting, chances are almost 100% it will work w/ @ctiVideo :)

For a list of tested devices and our selection of capture devices you can buy on-line, please visit our Capture Devices Catalog page.

There are two possible reasons:

• The drivers for your device are not installed correctly. Please, follow the documentation, that came with your device to setup the software drivers. Generally: if no other piece of software (including the one, that came with the device) can connect to the video device, @ctiVideo will not connect either.

• Your video device is not compatible with Video for Windows. See the previous question and consult the documentation of your device to check if it is designed to work w/ VfW. You might be surprised, taht some very expensive devices might not support VfW. They usually come w/ hardware, specially designed for them for capturing video and/or frames. You might have to check with the manufacturer's web site for latest drivers and updates, as well as additional drivers for VfW.

There are two limitations in the evaluation version of of @ctiVideo: all the single frame captured with the control are marked with a horizontal line in different gray shades and the length of the captured clips is limited to 10 seconds. These limitations are removed in the Registered version of the control.

There are two limitations in the evaluation version of of @ctiVideo: all the single frame captured with the control are marked with a horizontal line in different gray shades and the length of the captured clips is limited to 10 seconds. These limitations are removed in the Registered version of the control.

No. @ctiVideo is a 32-bit only tool and we are not planning to release a 16-bit version in foreseeable future.

Yes. Althought not tested and not supported for VB4, it will work with the 32-bit VB4 compiler. You can use the code, provided on the Samples page with VB4 - it was designed and tested in VB6, but does not have any version-specific parts.

Yes, you can. If you need to show/capture multiple different video sources, you'll need multiple instances of @ctiVideo running and connected to separate video boards. Not every brand of video board will allow you to install multiple boards in one PC. If you need to capture from more than one device, have a look at the winnov boards (www.winnov.com). You can run up to four of them in a single box simultaneously. Most of the other boards cannot do that. But usually you can mix and match devices from different manufacturers, or even from one manufacturer, but with different architecture (e.g. most of the times you can have one Hauppauge WinTV PCI and one WinTV USB at the same time and they will both work). The key is you need to be able to see them as separate devices in the video device list.

Another possibility is to use capture card (frame grabber) with more than one input (most of the middle/high-end grabbers offer at least 2 inputs, some offer up to 8). In this case you can connect your cameras to the different inputs of the card. Video-for-windows doesn't provide an API for selecting the source, but if you are using one fixed type of frame grabber, we have a solution using the ShowSourceDialog method and SendKeys from within your code. We also have a solution for complete control of Source/Standard/Brightness/Contrast/Hue/Saturation of Brooktree BT8x8 based capture boards (send an email to controls@activevideotools.com for more information).

Yes. Both to a BMP file or to a Bitmap object. See CaptureFrame and GrabFrame methods.

No. You need the @ctiVideoFX plug-in filter to do that. Please, click here for more details.

Check the AudioHardwareAvailable propery to see if the computer has audio-capture capabilities. If TRUE, you can set the CaptureAudio property to TRUE and the AVI file you capture will contain also the sound. Depends on the type of framegrabber/camera. Most of the low/middle range products use the sound card for capturing/playback of the soundtrack of the AVI. Many of the high-end products have their own sound circuits and compressors.

No, you don't need to pay royalty fees for distributing this product. You are required to obtain one license for each developer that works on the project (i.e. if you have three developers, working on a complex application, you need to obtain 3 licenses, although only one of the developers might be working on the video-related part).

We have compiled a special section on distributing our controls. Please, click here to view the distribution tips.

No. @ctiVideo is not designed to run within Internet Explorer. If you need to capture frames or live video from within a web page, please have a look at @ctiVideo.Web. Click here to find out more about this product.

Although not specifically tested, our components should run OK under Delphi 4, 5 and 6. We have received some reports from users about certain incompatibilities of earlier versions of @ctiVideo with Delphi 4. If you are experiencing probles with our controls, please send us an email at support@activevideotools.com or use our on-line bug report form here.

We are constantly expanding our samples library. All the samples are available here. If you have successfully implemented any of our products with another development platform and would like to share your experience and code with our developers community, please send an email to code@activevideotools.com.

@ctiVideo OCX does not provide tools for control of the audio format. This is done in the output filters (AVIEncoder, RMEncoder, WMFEncoder).

The CODECs are installable pieces of software, which encode and decode the audio and video signal. Some of them come with Windows (like MS Video 1, Intel Indeo 3.4, Cinepak), others are installed by some software packages (Like Microsoft Windows Media MPEG4, etc.), while third are hardware related products, which are available only on computers that have certain video hardware (like Winnov WNV1, ATI Video, etc.). You have to make sure that you are using for recording a CODEC, which is available on the machine you'll be using for playback.

You can find more information about video CODECs here:
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/archive/devdes/fourcc.asp
http://www.moviecodec.com/

Please, note, that the URLs above are to third-party websites, not related to ActiVideo in any way and ActiVideo is not responsible for the contents of these sites.

Most probably they are missing a video CODEC. See "What is a Video CODEC?" question for more details.

WMFEncoder component is based on the Windows Media Format SDK (same technology as Microsoft Windows Media Encoder). Thus it has all the inherent features and limitations of the streaming platform it uses - including the buffering and the delay. If you need a real-time stream, you might want to enter the Beta program for our @ctiVideo.Conf components, which are based on the Microsoft NetMeeting SDK.

You can use Windows Media Player (www.windowsmedia.com) or any other player, which supports AVI format. To open a file, just point the player to the fully qualified filename.

Yes, you can use the DivX codec with our products. You can either use the compression dialog of the control and select the codec from the list of available codecs, or use @ctiVideo together with AVIEncoder to gain programmatically access to the codec selection and properties.

In order to access a firewire device from @ctiVideo, you'll need a legacy Video-for-Windows driver, which wraps around your firewire driver and makes it accessible to VfW devices. @ctiVideo does not directly talk to firewire devices.