Video for Windows

[The feature associated with this page, Multimedia Timers, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by Multimedia Class Scheduler Service. Multimedia Class Scheduler Service has been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use Multimedia Class Scheduler Service instead of Multimedia Timers, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

Video for Windows (VFW) provides functions that enable an application to process video data. VFW was introduced in 16-bit Windows. Many of its features have been superseded by features in DirectX. For more information, see the DirectX documentation.

The following topics are discussed in the Video for Windows documentation.