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Windows Video Hardware

Troubleshooting Windows Video Devices

If you are having trouble using the Image Acquisition Toolbox™ software with a supported Windows® video acquisition device, try the following:

  1. Install the Image Acquisition Toolbox OS Generic Video Interface Support Package. It includes the necessary files to use the winvideo adaptor.

    Starting with version R2014a, each adaptor is available separately through MATLAB® Add-Ons. See Image Acquisition Support Packages for Hardware Adaptors for information about installing the adaptors.

  2. Confirm that another imaging application is not connected to the camera.

  3. Confirm that the camera and its supported video formats are detected by the standalone hardware detection utility detectDevices.exe (64-bit), which is installed in

    MATLABROOT\toolbox\imaq\imaqextern\utilities\detectDevices\win64

    where MATLABROOT is the MATLAB installation folder. For example:

    C:Program Files\MATLAB\R2018a\toolbox\imaq\imaqextern\utilities\detectDevices\win64

    The following is sample output when you run detectDevices.exe in this folder:

    Hardware detection application for the R2018a version of Image Acquisition Toolbox. 
Detecting hardware for the winvideo adaptor.

    Found device: IPEVO Point 2 View
               Found format: YUY2_640x480
               Found format: YUY2_320x240
               Found format: YUY2_800x600
               Found format: YUY2_1024x768
               Found format: YUY2_1280x1024
               Found format: YUY2_1600x1200
               Found format: YUY2_640x480
               Found format: MJPG_640x480
               Found format: MJPG_320x240
               Found format: MJPG_800x600
               Found format: MJPG_1024x768
               Found format: MJPG_1280x1024
               Found format: MJPG_1600x1200
               Found format: MJPG_640x480

  4. Confirm that the camera is detected in other DirectShow compliant applications, such as VLC Media Player. Utilities such as GraphEdit or AmCap Sample, which are included with Microsoft® Windows Software Development Kit (SDK), are also useful for troubleshooting DirectShow driver related issues.

  5. Some camera and video capture hardware manufacturers provide DirectShow drivers that need to be installed in order to use the hardware with imaging applications on Windows. For example, Thorlabs and IDS Imaging are both hardware manufacturers that provide software packages that include DirectShow drivers. Make sure you install the 64-bit version of the DirectShow drivers, as MATLAB is a 64-bit application.

  6. Some vendor-provided DirectShow drivers might need to be registered using a vendor-provided utility in order to use the hardware with imaging applications on Windows. Refer to the vendor-provided instructions.