VirtualDub 1.5.5 (experimental) released

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (98/NT/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 1.5.5 is out on SourceForge and is the first version that I’ve explicitly tagged as “experimental.” The primary reason is the new display code ?￠a??a€? 1.5.5 is the first version to use DirectDraw by default, the result of which is a significant increase in rendering speed as well as a usable stretch. (Right-click the panes for the new options.) 1.5.4 is pretty stable at this point and as such it’s a good idea to split versions into stable and development releases. So please try 1.5.5 and report the problems, and if you have problems, use 1.5.4. 1.5.5 does add a few more workarounds for various problems as well as some optimizations for direct stream copy mode, so if all goes well it should work better than 1.5.4.

1.5.5 allows audio filters to be plugins, but I haven’t completed the audio filter SDK yet and I’m not sure I like the current API. For those of you that want to experiment with it, there is a new “samplefilter” project in the VirtualDub source code. (Contact me if you want the preliminary SDK.) Keep in mind that the API is still fluid and I’ll probably nuke this API version in the future.

There is no P4 version of 1.5.5, and there may not be P4 versions of subsequent releases. The reason is that Intel C/C++ 6.0 started miscompiling parts of the code base starting with 1.5.5 in ways that can cause crashes and/or heap corruption ?￠a??a€? specifically, in some exception handling contexts the generated code double-destroys objects. This then causes string objects to trash memory. As I’m increasingly moving toward dynamic strings instead of fixed-size buffers for text handling I’ve decided that I cannot afford possible instability in my P4 releases in exchange for the minor performance gains provided by the Intel compiler. The code base still compiles under Intel C/C++ however, for those of you that want to try.

Download : List download mirrors for V1.5.5 release build (VirtualDub-1.5.5.zip)

Author : Virtualdub