Download VirtualDub 1.6.13 experimental

With VirtualDub, video can be captured and converted (capture and encoding). However, it is not intended for intensive editing of the video, it is best to use programs such as Adobe Premiere. The developer has been busy developing VirtualDub and released version 1.6.13 experimental. It is now possible to play video files with variable bit-rate audio and several bugs have been fixed. The announcement looks like this:

Time to flush the pipeline. 🙂

Besides the usual slew of bug fixes, there are two fairly major changes in this version. One is the addition of code to properly read files that have variable bit-rate (VBR) audio. You still can’t write such files, for various reasons, but they should preview and decode now, and more importantly, you can convert them to non-VBR. (Contrary to popular opinion, making this work isn’t just a matter of not rewriting the header. The method of doing sample-to-byte and byte-to-sample conversion is different.) The other change is that, in addition to putting in a workaround for the quirk in the Creative MP3 codec, VirtualDub now also stores the name of the audio codec as well as the selected compressed wave format in order to ensure that the selected codec is used, and not another codec that also supports that format. I still don’t recommend having more than one MP3 codec installed — crossfading in Windows Media Player seems to be a rather common liability — but it should work a bit better now for the unsuspecting.

A tertiary side change is that the help file has been converted from a zipped collection of files to a standard Windows HTML Help file (.chm). It took a bit of hacky batch file code to get this to work — some dork made the HTML Help Compiler return 0 on failure and 1 on success — but it turned out to be fairly painless once I found out how to generate the project files and to launch hh.exe, and now full-text search is available.

Barring major problems, I’ll re-release 1.6.13+$ANY_MINOR_FIXES to 1.6.14/stable.

[features added]

• Added support for pass-through of PCM audio that has more than 2 channels.
• Added limited support for correctly seeking when reading AVI files with VBR audio. The VBR audio still cannot be written as such in Direct mode, however.
• Added /hexedit command line switch.
• Converted help file to HTML Help (.chm) format.
• Hex editor: Open dialog now persists its “open as read-only” setting.
• Hex editor: Added keyboard shortcuts for open and save.
• Hex editor: Stopping a RIFF scan still shows partial info.
• Capture: Increased speed of audio resampler.
• Capture: Added ability to fine-tune channel tuning.
• Capture: The command-line /capstart option can now trigger a capture for shorter than one minute using an “s” prefix, ie 10s.
• Capture: The “hide on capture” setting is now auto-saved.

[bugs fixed]

• JPEG files lacking a JFIF or Exim header were not recognized.
• Error dialogs from Windows on disk or DLL load errors are now suppressed for command-line invocations.
• TARGA files with a width of 1 were not written correctly.
• Previewing an advanced audio filter graph using a format that the sound card could not play led to a deadlock.
• Attempting to use audio conversion or resampling with an input PCM format that was not mono/stereo 8/16-bit led to a crash. For now, attempting to do this now throws an error.
• Fixed redraw problems when adjusting the cropping settings of a video filter that is already being cropped on input.
• Added workaround for broken AVI files that have MP3 audio streams with nBlockAlign=0.
• Fixed audio stream sometimes being truncated when the audio stream’s nBlockAlign doesn’t match its dwSampleSize value.
• Tabbing now works within the border fields of the cropping dialogs.
• 16-bit (565) format was using a bogus bit mask for the green channel.
• Added workaround for livelock when using Creative MP3 codec caused by strange PostThreadMessage() call within that codec.
• When a video filter failed with an error during filter preview, the error was not displayed.
• Fixed clicking in DV type-1 audio decoding when switches in audio sampling rate are encountered.
• Added code to prevent confusion when multiple MP3 audio codecs are installed.
• Capture: Video timing adjustment now defaults to enabled.
• Capture: Cropping dialog did not always display live video properly if preview acceleration wasn’t enabled.
• Capture: Fixed intermittent crash when disabling filtering with a DirectShow driver.
• Capture: An error is now displayed when DirectShow filter graph construction fails when starting capture.
• Capture: The default display mode for DirectShow drivers couldn’t be set to None.
• Capture: BT8x8 Tweaker could cause U and V to swap on some cards.

[regressions fixed]

• Filter cropping dialog crashed when no video file was loaded.
• Redraw requests could cause the output frame to be updated even if the output frame was disabled.
• Capture: Frame rate went crazy when using Set Custom Format with DirectShow drivers.
• Capture: Video codecs received a frame rate that was 1/10th that of the correct value (messed up bitrate values ​​accordingly).

[break]The following two flavors are available:
VirtualDub 1.6.13 experimental
VirtualDub 1.6.13 experimental for AMD64