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Packt Releases VirtualDub Book as a Free Download

Posted by packt on · 11 comments
PacktPub.com; By Damian Carvill 		Mail this story
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Learning VirtualDub, the only professional book available for the leading open source video capture and processing tool, has today been released as a free download by Packt Publishing. First released in May 2005, the book is designed to get users started and then quickly learn the advanced features of VirtualDub.

Learning VirtualDub, the only professional book available for the leading open source video capture and processing tool, has today been released as a free download by Packt Publishing. First released in May 2005, the book is designed to get users started and then quickly learn the advanced features of VirtualDub.

Innovation in digital recording and the sharing of personal videos has seen a dramatic rise in the download rates of free applications that edit and process video clips. With almost 10 million downloads, VirtualDub is the leading choice for both amateur and professional video editors.

“This free eBook will provide readers with a rapid and easy-to-use tutorial on the basic features of VirtualDub to help get them up and running, quickly” explains the book’s developer, David Barnes. “Amongst other things, it covers the art of effective encoding and compression, so users end up with great quality videos that won’t hog their bandwidth forever” he concludes.

On first approach, VirtualDub can be daunting and with little documentation available, a large number of users never get further than simply downloading it. Therefore the decision to release Learning VirtualDub as a free PDF eBook will be greeted by new and established users as a timely bonus.

The eBook is now free to download from Packt’s website: Learning VirtualDub. Available as an immediate PDF download, Packt’s eBooks are printable with copy and paste privileges enabled.

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Comments (11)

techiem2 ·
Kinda pointless to most of us as there is no Linux port of VirtualDub. And the fact that: (from the page)
Quoting:Sorry, but there is no native version for Mac OS X or Linux.


Quoting: Source code -- 1.8.6 (stable)

You'll want this file to look at the innards of VirtualDub and to recompile the program. All custom tools necessary to build the release executable and help file are included (verinc, mapconv, disasm, and Lina), but you will need the Microsoft Platform SDK and DirectX SDKs, as well as the yasm assembler. You need Visual Studio 2005 Professional to build VirtualDub.


So sure it's foss, but Windows only foss until someone rewrites the code.
Sander_Marechal ·
Windows only FOSS is still FOSS.
herzeleid ·
> Windows only FOSS is still FOSS.

If that's how FOSS is defined, then I really don't give a crap about FOSS. I want Linux!

edit: How "free" is it and in what sense is it free, if it's tied to microsoft windows?
techiem2 ·
Yeah. Just not very useful for us Linux folks. Too bad. As I recall VDub is pretty nice (I vaguely remember playing with it a little years ago). I guess nobody has had the time/desire to try to rewrite all the Windows-tied code for a linux port.
tracyanne ·
Quoting:Windows only FOSS is still FOSS


Actually it's still OSS, I'd hesitate to call it Free.
techiem2 ·
Right, that's an interesting point. While it is technically FOSS from a licensing standpoint, the fact that the source is tied to the MS Dev Tools and DirectX somewhat reduces the F. Thus why someone would need to do some major code rewriting to make it run on Linux and be fully and truly FOSS in the spirit of FOSS.
techiem2 ·
Yeah I thought of trying to run it under Wine tonight to see if it would work. How's ReactOS doing these days? Maybe I'll toss it into a virtual machine...
Steven_Rosenber ·
The relative lack of pro-quality video-editing tools in Linux and the BSDs is a big problem. I still have to give KDEnlive and Cinelerra a try, but I'd be a lot more comfortable using an app that's in the main repository for whatever system I'm using (and Kino can't layer separate audio over video, so that's a non-starter).

Still, it's nice to get some FOSS tools for Windows, where I haven't exactly looked for video tools but I probably should.

Right now I'm getting my feet wet in Final Cut on the Mac, but I'd sure like to use FOSS instead.
techiem2 ·
I've used cinelerra a bit and played with some others a bit. The page for the newest kdenlive (kde4 version) looks promising. Right now Cinelerra seems to be the most capable I've used overall, but still has stability issues. Lives is also quite nice if you just need to crop a video, if it supports the formats you want.

The main common issue I've run across is the lack of support for editting and/or saving to common formats (or supporting editting the video stream but not the audio stream, etc.). Like divx/xvid, mpeg, mpeg2, raw dv, theora, etc.

jdixon ·
> Kinda pointless to most of us as there is no Linux port of VirtualDub.

>>Try running it under Wine or ReactOS

I understand from various sources that it runs fine under Wine. I can't say from personal experience.

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