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

Older Codecs


Windows ships with several codecs that VirtualDub may use. Launch VirtualDub to see what options are available to you. Select Video | Compression (the associated keyboard shortcut has changed in version 1.6.0 from Ctrl+C to Ctrl+P):

The list is populated with all the codecs available to VirtualDub. When you select one, VirtualDub will also display any known restrictions such as accepted color spaces on the right. In all honesty, the only codecs that you might ever use from that list are Microsoft’s H.261 and H.263 codecs. H.261 was designed for video-conferencing applications at bit rates that are multiples of 64 kilobits per second. H.263 advanced on H.261 resulting in higher coding efficiency. Unfortunately, both of them are locked and you cannot use them to compress video! Do not sigh; they are not exactly state-of-the-art anyway!

The same applies to audio codecs; the one that ships with Windows does not permit high-quality encodings. In particular, the MP3 codec bundle allows...