For the past 2-3 weeks I've been searching for different ways to implement custom video streaming and in more general video capturing and manipulating, going through DVR-cards, Video Capture Cards and stuff like that.

Somehow JMF was able to stay out of my sight for all this time, but since I find out about it I'm more and more sure that this is a comfortable level for me to start playing around with video and stuff.

One major topic that occurs to me while searching for more info was the presence of many posts where people were complaining about the fact that any particular camera ( most of the time I think they mean web cameras) doesn't work with JMF. Even though there are a lot of different cameras (not necessarily a web cam) that are not that expensive I want to play it safe and buy one that is proven to work well with the JMF.

Also due to lack of experience maybe this is irrelevant but since I'll buy the camera mostly for learning and experimenting I want to have the maximum freedom possible to mess with different features, options and so on.