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 is AviSynth?


AviSynth is a free, open source frameserver: it will serve frames to any application that uses the Video for Windows or DirectShow interfaces. Like VirtualDub, AviSynth has a modular structure that allows the use of plug-ins; in fact, you can load VirtualDub filters in AviSynth! So why opt for it?

Well, the first versions of AviSynth were only able to open AVI files, but it has matured over the years and is now able to open any media file supported by DirectShow, and there are plug-ins for many file formats such as MPEG-2. Furthermore, the open source community has contributed to the adoption of AviSynth with the development of plug-ins for all sorts of uses, from de-interlacing to quality assessment. On the other hand, AviSynth is not as easy to use as VirtualDub; it incorporates a scripting language versus the intuitive graphical user interface of VirtualDub. In short, the main reasons to use AviSynth over VirtualDub are:

  • To process a video format that is not supported...