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

Digital Video Resources


The two major types of digital resources are DV and Streaming video.

We have not categorized VCDs and DVDs as digital resources because our topic of discussion is capturing. We seldom use VirtualDub to capture videos from a VCD or a DVD and make copies of them, unless we do not have a CD or DVD player installed on our computer.

Sometimes processing video on a VCD or DVD may become necessary. For example, we may need to cut a section of movie from a VCD, add some subtitles and effects to it, and save it as a new VCD. In these situations, even though we do not capture the input video from digital media but simply open a file with VirtualDub, we are still dealing with a digital resource.

DV stands for Digital Video, which has become a popular standard in recent years. With this format, we can convert analog signals to digital ones at the hardware level. This task provides high quality at considerable speed. Therefore, the capture card is no longer necessary. All we need...