Flexible And Free Video Encoding Tools - Virtualdub

By Author: Ivan Cuxeva Jr
Total Articles: 779
Comment this article

Virtualdub is perhaps the most flexible and advanced video encoding tool on the web, you might be able to find others that do the job this one does, however most of them are paid and quite expensive. Virtualdub serves various purposes, it can encode a video stream just like Dr DivX, Auto GK, etc. it can add subtitles to video files, regardless is they are SRT or SSA , it can join or split video files and even handle MPEG-2 files through its variant Virtualdub-mod.

Expert video encoders prefer this particular tool to any other tool because of the many things that can be done with it, given that you install the right codecs and plugins. With this application people can decide the streams to encode and how to encode them, for instance you can select to hard code subs in the video which can be re-encoded from almost any format to AVI, you can then change the sampling mode of the audio and merge it with the video using any format such as 128-320kbps MP3 or AC3 which is always a plus for people who want to compress the video but keep the goodness of 5.1-9.1 Dolby digital sound. The video stream can be copied directly or you ...
... can go with full processing mode to have the adjustments necessary applied to it.

With this tool you can encode your videos using virtually any codec, the most famous are DivX, Xvid, MP4 with H.264 if you like and using any kind of video quantitizer matrix, since you deal with the codecs directly you have way more flexibility than any other tool, however you need to understand what you are doing, for instance choosing to encode a video in bi-cubic mode will give you different results compared to bi-linear or Lancoz.

It also goes without saying that you have full control over the video bit-rate and aspect ratio, this way you can transform a wide screen video (16:9) into a letterbox video (4:3) in order to watch it on a monitor which is not wide screen. The possibilities are endless with this tool but it is always recommended to use easier tools at first, then read some guides until you feel more comfortable and ready to take on Virtualdub.