§ ¶Documentation sucks

If you ever wonder why so many programs come with nonexistent or lousy documentation, it's because programmers hate to write it, and that's because it takes forever to do so. I decided to start working on an updated help file for VirtualDub today, because the help file I'm currently shipping is quite old and incomplete, and the new capture system is basically undocumented. I started at around 2pm today, it's now 8pm, and I think I'm only about a third through the capture system documentation, to say nothing of processing mode. Bleah.

I also just noticed that I've been listening to nothing but Minami Kurabayashi songs for the past six hours, so maybe it's time to take a break.

Hint regarding VirtualDub's new help file: To display help, VirtualDub has to decompress the VirtualDub.vdhelp file and launch a web browser. This can fail for a variety of reasons, such as a read-only program directory. If you run into problems, you can read the help files by changing the file extension to .zip and extracting the double-layered archive.

§ ¶VirtualDub's video panes

Seems like a lot of people haven't discovered this yet, given that I haven't updated the help files for 1.6.

The right and bottom borders of the video panes in VirtualDub are draggable. You can choose arbitrary zooms as well as aspect ratios, even those that may be different from the underlying file. This means that you can correctly view video clips that may have an aspect ratio greatly different than 1:1, such as a clip whose frames have been split into sequential fields. Right-clicking on the panes opens a context menu that allows selection of several predefined zooms and aspect ratios, along with an option to restore exact 1:1 pixel size.

Under Options > Preferences > Display, there are a number of options for choosing the rendering technology. If you are experiencing rendering issues, particularly with multiple monitors, turning off DirectX support entirely is recommended. This is required under current versions of WINE and under Windows XP Terminal Server (a.k.a. Remote Desktop) to work around DirectDraw blit clipping issues. VirtualDub automatically disables accelerated preview when it loses focus, in order to release system resources and to allow for reselection of a better mode when it is reactivated. It also disables it by default when Terminal Server is active — this is usually faster over a remote link anyway.