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

Defining an Input Source for VirtualDub


We want to connect VirtualDub to the source so that it will receive the captured data. To do this, we can use the companion application that came with the capturing card, enable the input channel that we want to capture, and close the application.

Run VirtualDub and select File | Capture avi. Another alternative is to open the Video Source window by pressing S in the Capture mode window (or selecting Video | Source from this window) and, in the Select a Video Source drop-down list, choose the desired input source. There are a number of input sources for video, which may vary based on the capturing card:

Choose the TV input source (i.e. Video Tuner), and click on TV Tuner in this dialog box. In the next dialog (assuming you’ve set the correct options while installing the new capture card), leave the settings unchanged, and just enter the number of the desired channel in the Channel group. Now, press Enter.

If no channels have been detected yet, it’s...