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

Manually Controlling Input/Output Colorspaces


VirtualDub is a very reliable and robust application and it is safe to trust VirtualDub more than your codec provider, especially for some older codecs. As of VirtualDub 1.6.0, you can control the colorspace request from the decompressor as well as the colorspace fed into the compressor.

Normally you do not need to worry about these settings, but in some cases you might want to force the codec into one particular setting so that VirtualDub can do the rest. Bring up the configuration (shown below) via Video | Color Depth; the left column controls the format that VirtualDub will request from the codec, while the right column controls the format that VirtualDub will deliver to the codec:

A popular example is chroma interpolation; most codecs that compress in YUV have reduced resolution of U and V and do not fully interpolate when decompressing. Using this feature, you could force the codec to output its native color space so that VirtualDub can do...