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

Adding Codecs


Before you go ahead and buy any of the listed commercial codecs, you should try their evaluation versions and compare them with the free ones. Most vendors allow 30 days of encoding time or a limited number of encodings, so you should be able to encode a few of your videos. If you are not satisfied with the output or you feel that the free codecs serve you better, go with your instinct—there is nothing to guarantee that commercial software will be better than free software! A lot of the time, free software gives highly priced software a hard run for money: VirtualDub is a perfect example—it’s the king of video-processing applications in its range.

Codecs will often come with an installer, in which case installation is trivial. Double-click on the executable and follow the instructions. Others will come in a ZIP file, which you need to extract; they will also contain a file with the .inf extension. Right-click on the file and select Install—everything else will be taken care...