VirtualDub is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

video capture Video capture is the process of converting an analog video signal—such as that produced by a video camera, DVD player, or television tuner—to digital video and sending it to local storage or to external circuitry. The resulting digital data ...

and

video processing In electronics engineering, video processing is a particular case of signal processing, in particular image processing, which often employs filter (video), video filters and where the input and output Signal (electrical engineering), signals are vid ...

utility for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

written by Avery Lee. It is designed to process linear video streams, including filtering and recompression. It uses

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram (given name), Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail (name), Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (author ...

container format A container format (informally, sometimes called a wrapper) or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Nota ...

to store captured video. The first version of VirtualDub, written for

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

, to be released on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source soft ...

was uploaded on August 20, 2000. In 2009, the third-party software print guide ''Learning VirtualDub'' referred to VirtualDub as "the leading free Open Source video capture and processing tool". Due to its "powerful" versatility and usefulness especially in the field of video processing (see below), ''

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online-only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tec ...

'' has referred to VirtualDub as "something of a '

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editin ...

' for video files", ''PC Perspective'' recommends it for its low overhead, and

nextmedia Nextmedia Pty Limited (styled as nextmedia) is an Australian media company which publishes special interest magazines in the sport, humor, and hobby (among others). The company is headquartered in Sydney and owned by The Forum Media Group, a Ge ...

's ''PC & Tech Authority'' particularly praises it for its ''Direct stream copy'' feature to avoid generational degradation of video quality when performing simple editing and trimming tasks and the fact that VirtualDub "offers several valuable features that other packages lack, and helps you get quick results without any fuss or patronising wizards". VirtualDub is recommended for use by professional computer and tech magazines, guides, and reviewers such as ''PC World'',Gralla, Preston (2009)
''Capsule review: VirtualDub (32-bit version)''
''PC World'', Mar 13, 2009 ''PC & Tech Authority'',Fearon, David (2011)
''How to: convert video footage with VirtualDub''
''PC & Tech Authority'', 18 February 2011 ''PC Perspective'',Shrout, Ryan (2017)
''NVIDIA FCAT VR - Preview of a New Performance Tool''
''PC Perspective'', March 1, 2017 technologies guide website ''MakeTechEasier'', freeware and open source software review site

Ghacks ''Ghacks Technology News'' is a technology blog created by Martin Brinkmann in October 2005. Its primary focus is on web browser and Windows tips, software, guides and reviews. Coverage The editor-in-chief and founder is Martin Brinkmann. All ...

Speed Demos Archive Speed Demos Archive (SDA) is a website dedicated to video game speedruns. SDA's primary focus is hosting downloadable, high-quality speedrun videos, and currently has runs of over eleven hundred games, with more being added on a regular basis. S ...

,Entr
''VirtualDub''
on Speed Demos Archive as well as third-party professional video production companies, and the creators of

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

. Several hundred third-party plug-ins for VirtualDub exist, including by professional software companies. Furthermore, Debugmode Wax allows use of VirtualDub plug-ins in professional video editing software such as

Adobe Premiere Pro Adobe Premiere Pro is a video editing application developed by Adobe Inc. and is distributed as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. It is primarily used for producing high-quality videos across various industries. History Original A ...

and

Vegas Pro Vegas Pro (stylized as VEGAS Pro, formerly known as Sony Vegas) is a professional video editing software package for non-linear editing (NLE), designed to run on the Microsoft Windows operating system. The first release of Vegas Beta was on ...

Features

VirtualDub is designed for

but may run on

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

using

(for example, to use it with the popular Deshaker plugin). However, native support for these systems is not available. VirtualDub was made to operate exclusively on

files; however, a plugin API was added from version 1.7.2 which allows the import of other formats. Appropriate video and audio

codec A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder o ...

s need to be installed.

Video capture

VirtualDub supports both

DirectShow DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's ea ...

and

Video for Windows Video for Windows was a suite of video-playing and editing software introduced by Microsoft in 1992. A runtime version for viewing videos only was made available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1, which then became an integral component of Windows ...

for video capture. Capture features include capture to any AVI variant, audio

VU meter A volume unit (VU) meter or standard volume indicator (SVI) is a device displaying a representation of the Signal-to-noise ratio, signal level in audio equipment. The original design was proposed in the 1940 Institute of Radio Engineers, IRE pap ...

s, overlay and preview modes,

histogram A histogram is a visual representation of the frequency distribution, distribution of quantitative data. To construct a histogram, the first step is to Data binning, "bin" (or "bucket") the range of values— divide the entire range of values in ...

, selectable

crop A crop is a plant that can be grown and harvested extensively for profit or subsistence. In other words, a crop is a plant or plant product that is grown for a specific purpose such as food, Fiber, fibre, or fuel. When plants of the same spe ...

area, video

noise reduction Noise reduction is the process of removing noise from a signal. Noise reduction techniques exist for audio and images. Noise reduction algorithms may distort the signal to some degree. Noise rejection is the ability of a circuit to isolate an u ...

, auto stop settings (based on capture time, file size, free space, and/or dropped frames), and designate alternate drive(s) for capture overflow. VirtualDub can help overcome problems with

digital camera A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in Digital data storage, digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Dig ...

s that also record video. Many models, especially Canon, record in an M-JPEG format incompatible with

Sony Vegas Vegas Pro (stylized as VEGAS Pro, formerly known as Sony Vegas) is a professional video editing software package for non-linear editing system, non-linear editing (NLE), designed to run on the Microsoft Windows operating system. The first rel ...

6.0 and 7.0. Saving AVI files as "old-style AVI" files allows them to appear in Vegas. VirtualDub supports DV capture from Type 2 (VfW)

FireWire IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony a ...

controllers only (It cannot work with Type 1). There is no DV batch capture, still image capture, or DV device control capability.

Video assembly

VirtualDub can create a video file from a series of image files in

Truevision TGA Truevision TGA, often referred to as TARGA, is a raster graphics file format created by Truevision Inc. (now part of Avid Technology). It was the native format of TARGA and VISTA boards, which were the first graphic cards for IBM-compatible ...

Windows Bitmap The BMP file format, or bitmap, is a raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device (such as a graphics adapter), especially on Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems. The BMP fil ...

file formats. Individual frames must be given file names numbered in sequential order without any gaps (e.g. 001.bmp, 002.bmp, 003.bmp..). From those, the frame rate can be adjusted, and other modifications such as the addition of a

soundtrack A soundtrack is a recorded audio signal accompanying and synchronised to the images of a book, drama, motion picture, radio program, television show, television program, or video game; colloquially, a commercially released soundtrack album of m ...

can be made. VirtualDub can also disassemble a video by extracting its soundtracks saving its frames into Truevision TGA or Windows Bitmap files.

Editing

VirtualDub can delete segments of a video file, append new segments, or reorder existing segments. Appended segments must have similar audio and

video format Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) system ...

s, dimensions, number of

audio channel An audio signal is a representation of sound, typically using either a changing level of electrical voltage for analog signals or a series of binary numbers for digital signals. Audio signals have frequencies in the audio frequency range of ro ...

frame rate Frame rate, most commonly expressed in frame/s, or FPS, is typically the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images (Film frame, frames) are captured or displayed. This definition applies to film and video cameras, computer animation, and moti ...

s and

sampling rate In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of "samples". A sample is a value of the signal at a point in time and/or s ...

s. Otherwise, VirtualDub is incapable of mixing dissimilar video files or adding transition effects between segments.

Video processing

VirtualDub comes with a number of video editing components known as "filters". They can perform basic tasks as arbitrary resize, converting the video to

grayscale In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a greyscale (more common in Commonwealth English) or grayscale (more common in American English) image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample (signal), s ...

, arbitrary rotation, crop, or changing simple values like brightness and contrast. Filters may be used during the video assembly as well. Filter plug-ins further extend VirtualDub's capabilities. A plug-in SDK is available for developers to create their own video and audio filters. Besides those basic features, its many third-party plug-ins make VirtualDub a "powerful" open-source tool when it comes to linear video processing, and in fact most of the hundreds of third-party plug-ins available for VirtualDub are filters related to either aesthetic effects or cleaning, fixing, and restoring image quality, such as various denoising and sharpening methods targeted especially at analogue and digital video signal and film defects (be they related to

VHS VHS (Video Home System) is a discontinued standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes, introduced in 1976 by JVC. It was the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period of the 1980s and 1990s. Ma ...

, faulty cables, a distorted analogue

terrestrial Terrestrial refers to things related to land or the planet Earth, as opposed to extraterrestrial. Terrestrial may also refer to: * Terrestrial animal, an animal that lives on land opposed to living in water, or sometimes an animal that lives on o ...

satellite A satellite or an artificial satellite is an object, typically a spacecraft, placed into orbit around a celestial body. They have a variety of uses, including communication relay, weather forecasting, navigation ( GPS), broadcasting, scient ...

TV reception, or digital compression),

deinterlacing Deinterlacing is the process of converting interlaced video into a non-interlaced or Progressive scan, progressive form. Interlaced video signals are commonly found in analog television, VHS, Laserdisc, digital television (HDTV) when in the 1080 ...

and

fields Fields may refer to: Music *Fields (band), an indie rock band formed in 2006 * Fields (progressive rock band), a progressive rock band formed in 1971 * ''Fields'' (album), an LP by Swedish-based indie rock band Junip (2010) * "Fields", a song by ...

manipulation,

colorspace A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with color profiling supported by various physical devices, it supports reproducible representations of colorwhether such representation entails an analog or a digital represen ...

conversion and manipulation, reverse telecine aka IVTC, deflickering, deshaking, adding and removing logos and subtitles, analysis of video content, etc. All of these processing features are fully batchable to apply the same effects on a large number of files.

Development

VirtualDub is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

, released under the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later and hosted on

SourceForge.net SourceForge is a web service founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source softw ...

VirtualDub was originally created by the author, then a college student, for the purpose of compressing

anime is a Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, , in Japan and in Ja ...

videos of ''

Sailor Moon is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Naoko Takeuchi. It was originally serialized in Kodansha's Shōjo manga, ''shōjo'' manga magazine ''Nakayoshi'' from 1991 to 1997; the 60 individual chapters (later reorganized into ...

''. It was written to read and write

videos, but support for input plug-ins was added, enabling it to read additional formats including

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods ...

Matroska Matroska (styled Matroška) is a project to create a container format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. The Matroska Multimedia Container is similar in concept to other containers like ...

, Flash Video,

Windows Media Windows Media is a discontinued multimedia framework for media creation and distribution for Microsoft Windows. It consists of a software development kit (SDK) with several application programming interfaces (API) and a number of prebuilt technol ...

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

MP4 MP4 (formally MPEG-4 Part 14), is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows ...

and others. Development stopped as of 2013 and the site's forums closed down in 2015. VirtualDub has spawned several

forks In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a Eating utensil, utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with whic ...

, including

VirtualDubMod VirtualDubMod is an open-source video capture and processing tool for Microsoft Windows, based on Avery Lee's VirtualDub. History The final version, 1.5.10.2, was released on 29 August 2005. Version 1.5.10.2 (build 2542) was released on 21 Febr ...

and ''Nandub''.

VirtualDub2

The latest fork is called VirtualDub2 (formerly VirtualDub FilterMod). It has all the features of the original VirtualDub, plus support for high bit-depth (i.e.,

deep color Color depth, also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to a pixel, the concept can be defined as bits ...

). It is no longer limited to

(Video Compression Manager) codecs, and AVI format limitations (such as limited VBR support, H.264/HEVC minor incompatibilities etc.). VirtualDub2 has built-in encode/decode of any container and video and audio compression formats supported by

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing vide ...

(

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and d ...

, HEVC, VP9, AAC, Opus and other formats) and can open and save

QuickTime File Format QuickTime File Format (QTFF) is a computer file format used natively by the QuickTime framework. Design The format specifies a multimedia container file that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: aud ...

(MOV),

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML video and the HTML audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored by ...

, AVI based on FFmpeg or only the audio from a video in M4A, Opus in Matroska, Ogg Opus, Vorbis, AAC or MP3 formats. It also has improved navigation, display and user interface (e.g. pan display when zoomed in, color format selection), improved performance, and support for high bit-depth color formats.

Past legal issues

Early versions of VirtualDub supported importing of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Advanced Systems Format Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format) is Microsoft's proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media Streaming media refers to multimedia de ...

, but this was removed in version 1.3d following an informal phone call from a Microsoft employee in 2000 claiming that it infringed one of Microsoft's

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s. Microsoft never identified any specific patent numbers that it believed to have been infringed, but speculation by others is that (expired in 2017) might be relevant. In August 2006, VirtualDub's German users who hosted copies of VirtualDub, or even linked to them on their web pages, began receiving cease and desist letters from a private individual that claimed to have German word mark on "VirtualDub". However this issue has been resolved: the word mark in Germany has been deleted and an injunction has been granted against the former owner of said word mark.

References

External links

* * *
VirtualDub2
on SourceForge {{Video editors Free and open-source video-editing software Free software primarily written in assembly language Free software programmed in C++ Windows-only free software Portable software Software that uses FFmpeg Free screencasting software