Windows® 98 Unleashed

Understanding Digital Video

Although other computer platforms (notably the Macintosh) could work with digital video earlier, for the Windows crowd the big moment came in 1992 with the release of Video for Windows (VfW) 1.0. As long as you installed a video capture card in your machine, you could hook up a camcorder or VCR to your computer. VfW came with a utility called VidCap that would take the incoming video, digitize it, and save the result to a file on your hard disk. You could then use VfW's VidEdit program to manipulate the digitized video frame-by-frame, just as your word processor manipulates text word-by-word.

Even if you weren't into editing video, VfW was a milestone because it came with a runtime module and driver that let anyone ...