Abstract: The application of multimedia technology in people's daily life is becoming more and more widely. Multimedia data, which includes image, video and audio, is becoming the major information media in the ifeld of information processing. Video capture technology is an important link of information processing, and the research on it has signiifcant practical value. A remote video capture method based on Video for Windows (VFW) is put forward in this paper. The method uses VFW to capture video data, adopts H.263 coding standard to compress the data and transmits the real-time video streams by stream socket of connection-oriented protocol. It plays video ifles combined with the multi-thread technology. Then a remote video capture system based on Windows is designed and realized. The experimental results show that the method has low CPU usage, low memory usage, high reliability and good application value.