Play Video in C++

In this tutorial, we will learn how to play any video in C++ using OpenCV. For doing so we are going to use OpenCV. Before proceeding further let’s see some basic information related to the topic.

Video: Video is basically a sequence of fast-moving images or frames. It can be of different formats like .mp4, .mkv, .webm, .avi, .flv, .3gp and many more.

Frame Rate: Frame rate is a frequency at which frames of a video are projected or displayed.

Suppose a video is being displayed at 30fps then it means 30 frames of that video are being displayed per second.

Note for implementation:

1. OpenCV C++ must be installed and linked to Visual Studio on your PC. (if you don’t know how to do it then click here.)
2. If the video file that you want to play is in the directory of the project then just enter the name of a file with extension otherwise enter the full path of the file while entering the name of the video file in the below program.

Program to Play Video in C++

#include<opencv2/opencv.hpp>
#include<iostream>

using namespace std;
using namespace cv;

int main()
{

  VideoCapture cap;
  Mat frame;
  string file;

  /* Enter the path of a file if the file is not in the directory of the project */
  cout<<"\nEnter name of a video file with extension: ";

  /* cin function cannot read space. Hence we have used getline function here. */
  getline(cin, file);

  cout<<"\n\n";

  /* open function is used to open the file */
  cap.open(file);

  /* Checking if the video file successfully opened. */
  if (cap.isOpened() == 0)
  {
    cout<< "\nError..!!\n";
    cout<<"\nMake sure=>";
    cout<<"\n1. Desired video file is in the folder of the project";
    cout<<"\n2. You have mentioned the extension of the file\n\n";
    exit(0);
  }

  /* Playing video as per mentioned frame rate */
  while (cap.read(frame))
  {

    /* You can process frame as per your requirement */

    /* namedWindow() is used to create a window with the mentioned name. In our case, window name is 'Playing video' */
		namedWindow("Playing video", WINDOW_AUTOSIZE);

    /* Imshow function is used to display an image and a video is basically sequence of fast moving images */
    imshow("Playing video", frame);

    /* Press esc to exit */
    if (waitKey(100) == 27)
    {
      break;
    }

  }

  /* when everything done, release the video capture object */
  cap.release();

  /* Closing all the frames after playing whole video */
  destroyAllWindows();

  return 0;

}

Input/Output:

This is how we can play video in C++ using OpenCV.

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