Book Image

Learning VirtualDub: The Complete Guide to Capturing, Processing and Encoding Digital Video

Book Image

Learning VirtualDub: The Complete Guide to Capturing, Processing and Encoding Digital Video

Overview of this book

VirtualDub is one of the most popular video processing applications for Windows. As an open source application, it's free, and is constantly updated and expanded by an active community of developers and experts. VirtualDub is particularly popular for capturing video from analogue sources such as video tape, cleaning up the image and compressing it ready for distribution over the Internet. This book provides a rapid and easy to use tutorial to the basic features of VirtualDub to get you up and running quickly. It explains how to capture great quality video from various sources, use filters to clean up the captured image and add special effects. The book also shows how to use VirtualDub to cut and paste video to remove or insert sequences, including removing ad breaks or trailers. It goes on to cover the art of effective encoding and compression, so you end up with great quality videos that won't hog your bandwidth forever. VirtualDub is the fastest and most effective way to capture, process and encode video on your PC. This book gets you started fast, and goes on to give you full control of all the features of this legendary tool.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Learning VirtualDub
Credits
About the Authors
Introduction

Desktop Icons and Your Default Player


You have installed the three software packages. There are just a couple things to do before finishing this chapter. Put icons on your desktop, and re-associate the AVS scripts to open with your preferred video player.

In your file manager, go to the executable files for VirtualDub, the AuxSetup one in the VirtualDub folder (the utility to test your hard drive), and VDubMod. Right-click on each of the executables and choose Send To | Desktop (create shortcut). You’ll have icons on your desktop.

The AuxSetup hard drive test utility with VDubMod is the same one included with VirtualDub. There’s no need to have two icons for the same utility on your desktop, so skip that one.

Windows XP has two versions of the Windows Media Player in the c:\Program Files\Windows Media Player folder: the latest one named wmplayer.exe, and a version 6.4 player named mplayer2.exe. If opening an AVS script file results in the version 6.4 player opening, and you prefer WMP9 or 10 (or another player), right-click on an AVS script in your browser, select Open With | Choose the program and check the option to always open files of that type with it.