virtualdub?

All you need is "virtualdub" (free) and "ffdshow tryouts" (free). You may need to enable ZMBV in the ffdshow VFW options for it to work (don't know if it's on or off by default).

Some more advice:

-Convert the framerate to something lower in virtual dub. 30 should be enough as most dos games weren't ultra smooth anyway.

-xvid at 1000 kbit/s looks quite ok for me and is still much smaller than zmbv.

-Another advantage of xvid is that you can correct the aspect ratio of the dos vids by setting "Display Aspect Ratio" to 4:3 in the xvid settings.

And a question from me: zmbv encoder gives me error messages when I try to use it in virtual dub. Known issue? Any updated versions around? The one I have shows up as v0.1 in vdub.

Cool - so if all I'm doing is putting videos together to upload onto Google Video, VirtualDub should take care of that right? FFDShow seems to be a player rather than an editing tool?

Vdub won't be able to open the file if ffdshow isn't installed.

Got it - thanks!

Virtualdub can open Dosbox videos as long as the ZMBV codec is installed - no need for ffdshow. The codec is located in dosbox\zmbv (right click on the .inf and Install).

I tried using Roxio 9 on Vista Home Premium and the ZMBV codec never worked. But Roxio 9 on an XP system worked just fine with the codec. I can edit the .avi files just like any other supported format.
wonder if this is just another VISTA issue, or is there a way to get ZMBV to work in it?

There are two Windows multimedia frameworks: Video for Windows and DirectShow (used to be ActiveMovie). Video for Windows dates back to 1992 and DS to 1996. Both are supported in XP. ZMBV is a VfW codec and VirtualDub is a VfW application (DirectShow uses "filters"). It could be that Vista has dropped support for VfW, or maybe Roxio 9 has dropped VfW support on its Vista version.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/installed_codec.html is a nice utility for showing all the installed VfW codecs and DirectShow filters. ZMBV (Zip Block Motion Video) should show up as type: "Driver - Video" if it's installed properly.

PS. I just thought of ffdshow, which, I think, supports ZMBV decoding. Ffdshow is a directshow filter, so it should enable ZMBV decoding in DirectShow-only applications. Remember to run the ffdshow video decoder config and set ZMBV decoding to "libavcodec" (it's probably "disabled" by default) under Codecs.

edit: looks like Vista has deprecated both DirectShow and VfW in favor of "Media Foundation". I don't know anything about it.

J.B. wrote:

And a question from me: zmbv encoder gives me error messages when I try to use it in virtual dub. Known issue? Any updated versions around? The one I have shows up as v0.1 in vdub.

I'm having the same issue. I'm recording speedruns in Windows 3.1, but the game window isn't always 640x480. I want to crop the video files so that only the game window is visible, and I want to keep using ZMBV since it's smaller than H264 and lossless. Even without cropping or changing anything, any attempt to save an AVI in ZMBV format in VirtualDub produces the error message, "Unable to initialize the output video codec. Check that the video codec is compatible with the output video frame size and that the settings are correct, or try a different one."

Can anyone help me with editing and encoding ZMBV video?

the zmbv vfw codec is pretty limited in only supporting decompression and i think it might support compressing in 256 colours, but virtualdub only support true color input images which it can't handle.

I'm having the exact same issue, won't work in Vista for me.

My temporary solution was to install Dosbox and Vdub in XP using VMWare, it works fine.. but it would obviously be faster to do it directly in Vista.

I'm having the exact same issue

What "same" ?

I'm sorry, I should have been more specific.

What I meant is that I can't open ZMBV clips in Vdub using Vista. Tried installing FFDshow, still won't work. Works perfectly in XP but I can't find any way to open these files using Vdub in Vista.

Did you install the codec from the dosbox installation? Tried installing it with admin rights?

Yes.

Are you using Vista x64 and Vdbub x64?

any attempt to save an AVI in ZMBV format in VirtualDub produces the error message, "Unable to initialize the output video codec. Check that the video codec is compatible with the output video frame size and that the settings are correct, or try a different one."

I figured this out! Go to Video/Color Depth, and change it to "16 bit RGB (565)"
Make sure to force keyframes (from dosbox, orig was every 50 frames), so you can seek during playback.

I'm really glad I got this working, because huffy was giving me a file size of 2.7gb, and in ZMBV it's only 65mb. Excellent codec for old game captures. Might be good for cartoons, too. I think I'll even try it with other stuff.

The generally-favored codec for many applications lately is Xvid, which will likely result in even better compression than ZMBV.

I doubt that, ZMBV compression is pretty good and not lossy (in contrast to Xvid). Harekiet will probably know more details.