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

Chapter 3. Capture Preprocessing

It is time to make some software settings for the actual capturing process, assuming we have set up all the equipment in the right order from the previous chapter. These settings include file, video, audio, and capture settings inside VirtualDub, and are necessary to get an appropriate video file. The following diagram is a graphical representation of the capture preprocessing workflow:

We will study all these configurations step by step, in this chapter. Moreover, we will consider a practical example in which the entire capturing process, from receiving input analog signals to preparing them for writing in a popular DVD format, will be illustrated.

By the end of this chapter, we’ll be able to:

  • Select a suitable approach (VFW or WDM) for the capturing process, based on your Windows version

  • Specify file settings including: Name, Path, Allocated space

  • Define suitable timing and disk I/O for a capturing process

  • Achieve multisegment capturing

  • Set the audio compression...