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

Different Types of Capturing Devices


We can divide capturing devices into two main groups: internal devices and external devices. Internal devices need to be installed on an empty PCI slot on the motherboard. We can categorize them as:

  1. 1. TV tuners with composite and/or S-Video input: They are cheaper and function better than professional capture cards. Pinnacle PCTV, V-Stream PCI TV-PVR Tuner, and Hauppauge PVR250 TV Tuner Card are examples of such capture cards.

  2. 2. Graphics card with integrated video capture chip: Such cards have some extra input ports for receiving analog signals (such as ATI All-in-Wonder).

  3. 3. FireWire (IEEE1394/iLink) cards: These cards are usually used for digital video capture. These devices have an internal chip for video compression and the captured data is provided using the DV format.

    Note

    DS PYRO Professional is one of the perfect and the world’s best-selling 1394/FireWire cards. Adobe Premiere Pro software is included with this device. Other samples of...