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BASIC’S OF VIRTUALDUB

For Use With DivX

By Mike K.

 

VirtualDub is a user-friendly program that lets you do simple editing and compression of various video and audio files.

 

For DivX files, I use it mainly for three things: splitting large DivX movies into files under 700mb (cd-size), fixing broken DivX files, and recompressing DivX files to a smaller size.

 

 

 

Splitting Files:

 

            First go to File->OpenVideoFile and select the DivX file you want to split.  You will see the movie load into two small windows in VirtualDub(actually you'll just see two gray boxes until you press Play).  The left window is the input, and the right window is the output.

 

The controls along the bottom are standard DVD controls: Stop, Play(input), Play(output), Chapter Backward, Frame Backward, etc.  There's a scroll bar under the movie windows to let you quickly jump to any part of the movie.  There are also some buttons that may not be so obvious as to their function.  There are really only two useful buttons among these right now.  You'll see two buttons with an arrow and a picture of a key under it.  These allow you to jump one key-frame forward or backward.  This is helpful because you will need to cut the movie at a key-frame or you may have problems at the beginning or end of your two(or more) new files.

 

Now you'll have to set up VirtualDub to make a direct copy rather than trying to recompress your movie.  Go to Video->DirectStreamCopy.  Then go to Audio and make sure DirectStreamCopy is selected (it’s selected by default).  Now it's set to make a straight copy of your file.

 

All that's left is to select where you want to cut your movie.  Start by going to the very beginning of the movie.  Go to Edit->SetSelectionStart.  Then find the point you would like to end the movie, usually near the middle.  Just use the scroll bar, and when you find the approximate location use the Key-frame Forward/Key-frame Backward buttons to make sure you are on a key-frame (depending on how the movie was compressed there may be one key-frame every 1 second up to one every 10seconds).  Mark down the number of the frame you are on (bottom right-hand corner).  Go to Edit->SetSelectionEnd and then File->SaveAVI and choose the name of the first file (ex: moviename1.avi).  Now go back to the middle key-frame you selected.  You  can move back some key-frames if you would like the files to overlap a little.  Choose the location and then go to Edit->SetSelectionStart then go to the end of the movie and Edit->SetSelectionEnd.  Again, go to File->SaveAVI and choose a name for the second file (moviename2.avi).

 

Let it copy and then you're done!  Test the two new files and then you can delete the old large file.

 

 

 

Fixing DivX Movies:

 

            First let me say this ISN'T a cure-all for broken DivX files.  However, if you compress a file to DivX and it simply wont play on any standard DivX players there's a good chance this will fix it (this does NOT fix any graphics problems, only LOADING problems sometimes caused by Flask/etc.).

 

The idea is that VirtualDub is much more tolerant of problem files than programs like MicroDVD and WinMedia Player.  So run VirtualDub, set it for Direct copy (as done above).  And Edit->SaveAVI.  That's it.  It should resave your DivX file and automatically fix any basic errors.

 

 

 

Recompressing DivX:

 

Continued soon…

 

 


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