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


This chapter rounded up VirtualDub’s capabilities—you should now be able to run a full encoding job: from capturing to processing, multiplexing, and encoding. You are now fully aware of the possibilities, but feel free to refer back to the steps of each process. In this chapter we learned about the following:

  • Old and modern codecs

  • Interoperability—what it is and how it relates to you

  • Where to get and how to install new codecs

  • How to compress the audio and video

  • How to use job control to automate jobs in VirtualDub

  • How to manually calculate the total audio and video bitrate

  • How to configure modern codecs

  • How to use settings of modern MPEG-4 codecs like DivX and XviD

  • How to multiplex audio and video

That’s it! Good luck with your VirtualDub projects!