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

Compressing Video


This section will guide you through the steps of compressing video using the basic settings. You will also be introduced to some of the concepts used in modern codecs (such as DivX) so that you are better equipped to configure those to your needs. We will also touch on the issues of interoperability we mentioned earlier, but this time on a lower and more specific level.

The public interface that the operating system exposes to applications like VirtualDub is Video for Windows. This offers a simplistic way of defining the codec options before you encode a video. That is, it allows you to specify:

  • A quality factor (0 to 100)

  • The data rate in kilobytes/sec

  • The maximum interval that the stream will not contain a key-frame

There are two important points to note here:

  1. 1. The data rate is specified in kilobytes instead of kilobits; kilobits are a measure commonly used in the world of lossy compression.

  2. 2. The key-frame interval is very important as it will define how precisely you will...