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

What to Buy


We now understand what analog/digital video resources are and what internal and external video capture devices are. So which capture card should we buy, how much money must we pay for it, and how can we use it?

Although VirtualDub can receive video information from almost any capturing equipment, we will concentrate on internal capturing cards since we are going to study VirtualDub processing features together (including various codecs).

If you are new to the world of video capturing, start with a suitably priced internal device with acceptable functionality. I recommend a Pinnacle PCTV capture card. It has a low price, has been on the market for considerable time, and is not buggy.

I am not the marketing manager of any video capture card manufacturer! What I will tell you about capture cards is based on my personal experiments. Please keep in mind that even if a video capture card does not work for me, it may be suitable for you. Beside the capture card performance, other things...