¶VirtualDub 1.6.17 and 1.7.0 released
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.
At the moment, there seems to be a problem with the project web hosting on SourceForge, so if you are having trouble getting to the download page, both 1.6.17 and 1.7.0 are available on VirtualDub's SourceForge File Release page.
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.
Read on for the change lists, and enjoy.
Build 24469 (1.6.17, stable): [November 4, 2006]
[bugs fixed]
* Fixed divide by zero crash when Direct3D display is enabled and a video
pane is shrunken to zero width.
* UYVY video streams were being reported as RGB16.
* Direct3D display minidriver didn't clip properly when the image was
zoomed larger than the screen.
[regressions fixed]
* Capture: Reverted change in rendering strategy for DirectShow filter
graphs in order to fix field problems with ATI devices.
* Capture: Fixed crash when capturing video only using a VFW driver.
Build 25854 (1.7.0, experimental): [November 5, 2006]
[features added]
* New "smart rendering" feature for selective processing of video around
edit areas while copying as many existing frames as possible.
* New audio waveform/spectrogram display.
* Added option for preserving empty frames during recompression or
decompression instead of replicating frames.
* Added option for saving raw audio stream without a header.
* Added support for the Sony WAVE64 file format, for wave files larger than
4GB.
* Added support for reading and writing Adobe Filmstrip (.flm) files.
* Added support for reading Maya IFF (.iff) files. Currently this is
limited to RGB information at 8 bits/channel.
* PNG output is now supported.
* Resize video filter now has options for relative and aspect-ratio derived
sizing and to save defaults.
* Opening a video file from the command-line or drag-and-drop now sets the
filename as default for the Save As AVI/WAV dialogs.
* Added new pitch scaling audio filter.
* Improved quality of "center cut" audio filter (with suggestions from
Moitah).
* The main window and job control dialogs now save their positions.
* Opacity curves can now be attached to video filter instances.
* Volume adjustment now shows amplification factor in decibels.
* Filter API: Preview code preserves keyboard accelerators on preview
button.
* Job control: (X of Y) is now displayed in the job control window caption
when the job list is being processed.
* AVI Info now shows additional information for PCM audio streams encoded
using WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE.
* Capture: Added experimental option to insert arbitrary DirectShow
transform filters into a capture graph. To enable, specify the filter
moniker in [HKCUSoftwareFreewareVirtualDubHidden FeaturesCapDShow:
Transform filter name] in the Registry.
* Capture: Added full-screen toggle (Alt+Enter).
* Capture: Added support for switching DirectShow TV tuners between
antenna and cable modes.
[features removed]
* The "integral conversion" option under audio conversion is no longer
supported.
[bugs fixed]
* Fixed a case where the projected file size status indicator could overflow
for very long audio dumps.
* AVIs with MP3 audio streams where wBitsPerSample != 0 are now detected and
auto-corrected for better compatibility with the standard MP3 codec
installed in Windows.
* Rewrote segmentation code to buffer data instead of attempting size
prediction; this makes the segmentation more accurate and avoids dangling
key frames during on-the-fly compression.
* Added workaround for compatibility problems with Aero Glass in Windows
Vista beta 2.
* Audio displacement now works when processing only part of the audio
stream.
* Added warning for non-zero dwStart values in AVI files.
* Fixed a performance problem in the PNG decoder on large images with a lot
of IHDR blocks.
* Fixed errors in JPEG encoding with pure red or blue colors.
* Changed keyboard shortcut for Undo from Ctrl+U to the standard Ctrl+Z.
* Added workaround for annoying Microsoft security update that sometimes
prevents the help file from working.
* Fixed clamping in amplifier that caused -0x8000 values to change to
-0x7FFF.
* Capture: Duplicate raw wave formats are no longer shown with DirectShow-
based drivers.
* Capture: The UI now reflects changes to audio and video sources made
through the driver dialogs.
* Capture: Possible fix for crash when changing formats with DirectShow-
based devices due to threading issue.