Home

Virtual VCR
Introduction
Download
General Info
Settings
Filters
Screen Shots

Web Forum

Introduction
Virtual VCR is a DirectShow video capture application that allows you to capture Audio and Video to your hard drive in the AVI file format.

Features Summary

• Arbitrary resolution settings (480x576 etc).
• Compression codec selection and setup (Video and Audio)
• Smart Tee Preview for capturing and previewing at full resolutions
• Pre Filtering allows use of installed DirectShow filters [more]
• Video crop before capture
• Can be used with a Scheduler to capture at preset times [more]
• Command line options for use in BAT files etc
• Real-time Capture stats including compression ratio, bytes sec etc
• Small, Fast and Free

Requirements
Virtual VCR requires DirectX 8.1 you can download and install DirectX 8.1 from Microsoft before using Virtual VCR.

You will also need a video capture card or device that Virtual VCR can use to capture with. WDM drivers work best with Virtual VCR, VFW drivers may work but will more than likely have problems.

Recommendations
Virtual VCR works best with a video compression codec to compress the video as it is captured, it is recommended that you use a MJPEG coded as these types of codes are very fast and usually give very good results. One of the fastest MJPEG codec's is one by Pegasus Imaging, you can find out more about their MJPEG codec at the following web site:

http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm

Another alternative is a free video compression codec by the name of Huffyuv, this coded is free and can also be used with Virtual VCR for compressing video as it is captured. It can be download from the following web site:

http://math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html

PCI capture cards using the BT8*8 chip work well, you can download an open source WDM driver for this type of card from the following web site:

http://btwincap.sourceforge.net

This application has been tested using a Pinnacle PCTV Rave card with both the btwincap open source driver and also the 5.1 WDM driver from the Pinnacle site.

When capturing it is best to use the YUY2 colour space format with your MJPEG or Huffyuv video compression codes as this will give best performance with the lowest CPU usage.