Thank you for your answers. I do not mean to use all of them concurrently. Also if I use them with the same VideoCapture but one after the other I still get the memory growing. The only case where it is not is when I use the same video address. For example, in case I want to edit 1000 video files sequentially. I get the memory growing either if I use 1 instance of VideoCapture or multiple. Is that so specific? Is killing the process the only option for opencv?