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

Subtitles


Subtitles allow you to display text while your video is being played back. This can be to:

  • Translate foreign dialogs to the native language of the viewers

  • Make ambiguous dialogs or whispering clear

  • Add comments

There is really no limit to what you can do with subtitles nor should you restrict yourself; the great thing about home-made videos is creativity!

Many methods exist to insert subtitles to a video; you can specifically:

  1. 1. "Burn" the subtitles in the video or in other words, make them part of the video at the pixel level

  2. 2. Attach them to the video as a text stream.

  3. 3. Attach them to the video, externally, as text; this means they are not contained in the same file, but can be displayed using additional software

Naturally, each method has its own advantages and disadvantages; the main ones are presented in the following table:

Method

Advantages

Disadvantages

Burn-in

No additional software required for playback—subtitles will be displayed on every machine that can play the video...