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

Summary


We are now one more step up the ladder of video processing. As you can see, frameserving can prove to be very useful because:

  • You can serve AVI and MPEG-1 files through VirtualDub alone—no additional software is required. At the same time, you can apply filters and multiplex audio and video.

  • Older applications that use the Video for Windows interface can now read any file via a DirectShow tunnel in AviSynth.

  • You now have access to a huge library of additional filters you can use through AviSynth.

We touched on the significance of using the right tool for the right job and this chapter aimed to help you realize the potential of both frameservers so that you may take the right decision in the face of future problems. You will find that using VirtualDub is convenient most of the time since it can compress the output. AviSynth on the other hand is useful to accomplish tasks VirtualDub cannot carry out. One does need to think of the two applications as separate; you could serve frames with...