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 Frameservers Can Do


The VirtualDub frameserver supports:

  • VirtualDub video filters

  • Audio displacement/skew correction

  • Audio source multiplexing

  • Range editing (such as selection and deletion)

Unsupported features are:

  • Inverse telecine (3:2 pulldown removal)

  • Audio conversion and interleaving

  • Compression—both for video and audio

  • Filters that introduce a lag (e.g. temporal smoother)

The above list gives you a good idea of what is possible with the VirtualDub frameserver. AviSynth is very extensive due to the high number of plug-ins available out there; with respect to VirtualDub, it isn’t so much what you can do but what you

cannot do with it, for example:

  • Capturing video

  • Audio and video multiplexing

  • Video or audio compressing

  • Range editing

The list is not exhaustive and I should point out that a frameserver is very different in nature to VirtualDub itself: It will deliver uncompressed frames to the target application. Therefore compressing is fundamentally impossible. This also renders multiplexing and...