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

Video Settings


The Video menu provides many more options than the Audio menu. Some of these options are used for visualization in VirtualDub capture mode, and some of them are used for video capture settings:

The first step in the video settings is defining the video format. Press F (or choose Video | Format) to activate the Video Format dialog box. There are two drop-down lists that we can use for setting the frame size and pixel format.

A box next to these two fields shows the size of each uncompressed frame, based on the selected options. For example, if we select 320x240 for Resolution and RGB 555 (16 bit) for Pixel Depth, then the size of each frame can be computed as:

320 (pixels) x 240 (pixels) x 2 (bytes or 16bit) = 153600

This field is designed to give an overall idea about the size of the captured video:

Select YUY2, since we have decided to capture data for a DVD. We can then choose the MPEG 4 codec later. After setting frame size and pixel format, press Apply, and then OK to close...