View source for X264 VFW

== VideoWriter & H.264==
Open CV's VideoWriter is used for saving image sequences into Video files. For Windows, the default Open CV implementation for saving MJPEG files do not provide much compression, if you are saving a long video file it may consume lost of hard drive space. H.264 video format generally provide great compression ratio with good image quality. One of the option to encode H.264 file using Open CV's VideoWriter, is to use the FFMPEG backend, and install Cisco's H.264 codec from [https://github.com/cisco/openh264/releases here]. While the cisco H.264 implementation using FFMpeg provides good default compression ratio, there is no option to specific the quality of the video. Some times we would like to have higher quality video output that take up more spaces, some times we want lower quality video that can save spaces and we would like to have that control.

Here we are going to walk you through using the MSMF backend with VideoWriter, with which you can read and write vide in H264 codec, without needing to download any extra codec from CISCO.

== System Requirement ==
{| style="text-align:center" border="1px" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0"
!Component || Requirement || Detail 
|-
|Emgu CV || Version 4.0+ ||
|-
|Operation System || Windows ||
|}

* The code used in this tutorial use components from the Open CV / Emgu CV 4.0 release. 

== Creating VideoWriter ==
To use the H264 codec, you will need to make sure your video file has the ".mp4" extension. e.g.

<source lang="csharp">
String fileName = String.Format("video_out.mp4");
</source>

The FOURCC code has to be 'H264'. e.g.
<source lang="csharp">
int fourcc = VideoWriter.Fourcc('H', '2', '6', '4');
</source>

When creating the VideoWriter, we need to use the "MSMF" backend. In Emgu CV v4.0, we have wrapped the Open CV functions that can be used to query the backend. 
<source lang="csharp">
Backend[] backends = CvInvoke.WriterBackends;
int backend_idx = 0; //any backend;
foreach (Backend be in backends)
{
  if (be.Name.Equals("MSMF"))
  {
    backend_idx = be.ID;
    break;
  }
}
//backend_idx should be the VFW backend now
</source>

Now we can create our VideoWriter and write videos
<source lang="csharp">
using (VideoWriter vw = new VideoWriter(fileName, backend_idx, fourcc, 30, new Size(width, height), true))
{
// call vw.Write() to write frames to VideoWriter
}
</source>
Congratulations! Now you should have your H.264 video written out using MSMF. 

You can review your video, get a feel of the quality, check the file size on the file.

Hope this helps!