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

Summary


We have been introduced to some capture preprocessing that is very important for creating optimized videos. We learned that VirtualDub configuration for capturing falls into four categories:

  • File settings

  • Audio Settings

  • Video Settings

  • Capture Settings

Moreover, we learned that before writing captured signals on disk they should be buffered for better disk I/O management and optimized data capturing. Also, with the help of some VirtualDub internal mechanisms called Spill System Setup and Multi Segment Capturing we can capture and save files with more than 2GB.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to use some filters to optimize captured data.