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

Analog Video Resources


Data is sent in the form of analog signals from an analog video resource. For example, TV broadcasting stations and satellite broadcasting TV channels are analog resources that send video and audio signals as electromagnetic waves. A VHS cassette player is another example of an analog resource that outputs analog video and audio signals.

We can categorize analog video resources into equipment that receives analog signals as waves (like a TV antenna or satellite receiver) and equipment that uses analog media(like 8mm, VHS, and Hi8 tapes). Various devices like VCRs (Video Cassette Recorders), Camcorders, and 8mm Projectors are needed to play these media.

We can get output signals from analog video resources using three output cables. (In fact we can find three input ports in every capture card used for receiving analog signals.)

The first port is the antenna jack, used for receiving analog signals from TV channels and satellite receivers. This port is used to capture...