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

Serving Frames with VirtualDub


Launch VirtualDub and open an AVI file of your choice; we will serve its frames to another instance of VirtualDub so you may add a few filters if you like. Of course, serving frames between two VirtualDub instances is of no particular use, but it demonstrates the concept. There is an incompatibility of the frameserver with DirectShow and so you cannot use it with most recent video players. The application you will be serving frames to strictly needs to be using the older Video for Windows interface. AviSynth, on the other hand, can serve frames to any application since it supports DirectShow.

After you finish setting up VirtualDub, click on File | Start Frameserver. The following dialog will appear:

This allows you to set a name for the frameserver; BENT is the network name of my computer set in Windows. The second part designates the name of the file served and you can change it to whatever you like. Press Start and save the .vdr file that corresponds to the...