Video capture for the SDL library.
This API lets apps read input from video sources, like webcams. Camera devices can be enumerated, queried, and opened. Once opened, it will provide SDL_Surface objects as new frames of video come in. These surfaces can be uploaded to an SDL_Texture or processed as pixels in memory.
Consumer-level camera hardware tends to take a little while to warm up, once the device has been opened. Generally most camera apps have some sort of UI to take a picture (a button to snap a pic while a preview is showing, some sort of multi-second countdown for the user to pose, like a photo booth), which puts control in the users' hands, or they are intended to stay on for long times (Pokemon Go, etc).
It's not uncommon that a newly-opened camera will provide a couple of completely black frames, maybe followed by some under-exposed images. If taking single frame automatically, or recording video from a camera's input without the user initiating it from a preview, it could be wise to drop the first several frames (if not the first several seconds worth of frames!) before using images from a camera.