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.



I'd like to say that I slaved away tirelessly over the weekend to get this release out, but the truth is that I spent yesterday afternoon beating Xenosaga III, or rather, leveling a bit and then stomping the end boss. After recovering from the depressing realization that I had finished the probably the last game to feature KOS-MOS, I started final builds of VirtualDub only to discover that the AMD64 builds of the experimental branch were broken and had to go back to fix them. That's why the 1.6.17 branch shows a build date of yesterday.

1.7.0 is the new experimental version, and the first officially released version of VirtualDub to be built with Visual Studio 2005 Professional. In addition to the fixes that are in 1.6.17, it contains a number of new features, most notably smart rendering and filter blending. Smart rendering allows frame-precise editing of compressed video by only recompressing small sections around edits, with the rest of the frames copied in Direct mode. Filter blending allows opacity curves to be applied to individual filters, allowing a filter's effect to be applied only to certain frames. When both smart rendering and filter blending are enabled, the filter chain is skipped entirely when all filters are at opacity zero (transparent). This allows filtering only a portion of a video stream, and some scenarios that formerly required multiple passes and manual joins can now be done in a single pass. Both of these features work with existing video codecs and filters, and are explained in detail in the help. 1.7.0 also adds support for writing PNG files, importing MayaIFF image sequences, reading/writing Wave64 for WAV files larger than 2GB, and reading/writing Adobe Filmstrip sequences for rotoscoping in Photoshop.

If you are one of the few people still using Windows 95, you will need to stick with the 1.6.x series since starting with 1.7.0, VirtualDub will require Windows 98 or higher. However, if you are using Windows Vista, you should use 1.7.0 to resolve issues with the displays; later builds of Vista have fixed some of the compatibility problems with the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) that underlies Aero Glass, but only 1.7.0 will work without issues since I rearchitected part of the display engine to fix GDI-DirectDraw interop problems.

Finally, if you are still having problems Action Canceled with VirtualDub's help file, right-click on it in Windows Explorer and choose Unblock. The reason for this problem is that the KB896358 security update from Microsoft prevents HTML help files from working if they are located on a network share or have the Internet Explorer "downloaded from the Internet" tag (which shouldn't be getting applied to files from a .zip archive, but somehow is for some users). 1.7.0 will display a warning and offer to strip the Zone.Identifier stream, but you still need to do this manually for 1.6.17. You will have problems regardless if you place VirtualDub on a network share, so move the .chm file to a local drive and open it locally in that case.

Changelog

VirtualDub 1.6.17 (32-bit) release build (VirtualDub-1.6.17.zip) VirtualDub 1.6.17 (AMD 64-bit) release build (VirtualDub-1.6.17-AMD64.zip)

VirtualDub 1.7.0 (32-bit) release build (VirtualDub-1.7.0.zip) VirtualDub 1.7.0 (AMD 64-bit) release build (VirtualDub-1.7.0-AMD64.zip)

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