Frameserving is the simple concept of serving, passing, and feeding uncompressed frames to another application. For instance, if you have a video-processing application (it can even be a player) that cannot decode MPEG-1 files, you can use a frameserver to copy the frames from an MPEG-1 file to the application. This is usually done by writing a small dummy file that contains data specific to the frameserver, but is visible as a large uncompressed file to other applications. Most frameservers available can also process the video before passing it to the next application down the chain.
In this chapter, we will explore two frameservers—the one provided with VirtualDub and a second one called AviSynth. By the end of the chapter, you will know:
How to install and serve frames from MPEG-1 or AVI files through the VirtualDub frameserver
How to use AviSynth to serve frames from any file format your computer can decode, to any application (including VirtualDub)
How to use AviSynth...