Windows has directshow, linux has...?

I'm looking to write a program to among other things do video capture from a usb webcam. Now, if I was working in windows I'd use directshow, but I'm actually developing for linux.

My question is then, is there something similar to direct show in linux?

No.
And there is one more generic problem. Linux desktop is devided to GNOME (gtk) and KDE (qt). QT is there for longer time afaik ;-). Devs are trying to work this out, but it's very very hard.

Back to topic, afaik there isn't something like DS in KDE, neither in GNOME. In KDE4 there will be phonon.

PS: is that use of 'neither' gramatically correct? thx

I'd spent some time looking through the QT api, and I was starting to suspect that nothing like DS existed.

Looks like I'll be playing with v4l2 and a couple demo apps provided by the uvc team.

Thanks for the replies and links.

in response to the grammatical question: the answer is no.

The word you want to use there is 'nor'

I was interested in the topic and wanted to contribute somehow but all the other gurus beat me to the punch!

-Zorak

Mplayer can also access any v4l/v4l2 stream as well. This allows a Linux user to use Mplayer to do things like take in raw video feeds from webcams and video capture cards.

http://mplayer.hu