OK, I must apologise in advance for the language of this post, I am at my wits end with OpenCV video capture routine.
For the last 18 months I have been using OpenCV 2.4.6 quite happily. I recently decided to "upgrade" (and I use that term tentatively) to OpenCV 2.4.8. What a mistake that was! Algorithms that I have written that use the VideoCapture routine no longer work.
The problem is the opening of a video file. Yes, I have the file path correct. Each time I try to run it, the VideoCapture class returns false, indicating a failure to open the specified video file (despite successfully doing so under 2.4.6)
As far as I can tell it's to do with the ffmpeg codec and the new way in which the "Geniuses" at OpenCV have packaged it. Clearly the new version of OpenCV isn't designed to work with Windows or Visual Studio in any logical way (as most of the guides and help talk about Linux). I've followed many forum posts to no avail. I am not a compilation expert, I am researcher making use of the OpenCV api and do not have the time available to figure out how to get the new version working, when the old version quite happily worked "out of the box". Why was whatever change that was made, necessary? Surely the whole point of an api is that it's platform independent, and this was the case in 2.4.6. I can't even revert back to 2.4.6 because it's no longer available for download!