VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images. VirtualDub 1.6.11 is out in the wild, and captures a couple of months of bug fixes. The major change in this version is that, as I noted last time, I've spent a good deal of time expanding the help file. In particular, a lot more of the new 1.6.x capture system is now documented. There are still some holes here and there, but I'm beginning to think that I should do another experimental drive in the 1.6.x series and revisit the capture system, especially since 1.7.x is a ways off anyway (there are some issues with latency that I need to work out).

I did sneak a new feature into this build, though: support for custom video display shaders. This doesn't add any new processing capabilities, but it does allow arbitrary vertex and pixel shaders to be used to control the video display panes. In particular, it permits experimentation with filtering techniques beyond the usual point/bilinear/bicubic set, if you have a powerful enough video card and are sufficiently adept with Direct3D shaders. The file format is the standard Microsoft effect file format (.fx), and the surrounding setup is documented in the help file.

Changelog

VirtualDub 1.6.11 (32-bit) release build (VirtualDub-1.6.11.zip) VirtualDub 1.6.11 (AMD 64-bit) release build (VirtualDub-1.6.11-AMD64.zip)