Download DimP v1.1 beta

Requirements

• Windows XP, Vista might work too
• About 1GB RAM
• Microsoft .NET 2.0 runtime. Download it here (22 MB).
• A VfW (Video for Windows) MPEG-4 codec such as ffdshow.

Download Player + Examples

Slow motion video clips courtesy of Nobby Tech. Ltd., Weinberger Vision and David Alciatore. These videos have been re-encoded to be readable by DimP ; you can view the original videos by following the links.

Instructions

1. Download and extract the .zip file above into a folder of your choice,
2. Double-click on DimP.exe,
3. Open the "examples" folder and drag&drop a video file into the player,
4. Once the buffering is finished, you can play the video and drag its content.
5. On some examples, you might need to turn background stabilization off (Options menu).

Test with your own videos

You can test DimP with other video files, provided that:

• Your video is short. The current prototype decompresses the whole video into memory, so it is not able to handle videos of several minutes.
• Your video is of acceptable quality: not heavily compressed and with a sufficient framerate. Video resolution does not affect processing time.
• Your video is in the .avi format and uses a compression format compatible with VfW (e.g., DivX or Xvid if you have a codec such as ffdshow installed). You can easily re-encode videos into these formats using virtualdub and maybe its WMV plugin.

To process an .avi file in DimP, just drag&drop it into the video player and go get a coffee. The video does not have to be entirely processed for the direct manipulation to work. Closing the file or the application automatically saves the processing information into a .motion file. The processing can be resumed afterwards.

You can batch-process several video files by dragging and dropping them to DimP with the Ctrl key pressed.

Menu options

Troubleshooting

• Nothing happens when I double-click on DimP.exe.
  You need to install the .NET 2.0 runtime.
• DimP says "Failed initializing decompressor" or "unable to read frame".
  You need to install a MPEG-4 codec that supports VfW (Video for Windows). ffdshow rev. 610 (20061201) has been shown to work. Previous versions of ffdshow such as the one on sourceforge dating back from 2004 won't work. Uninstall ffdshow before updating it to a newer version.
• I've installed ffdshow but DimP still cannot read videos.
  Open the VFW ffdshow configuration window (Start menu -> ffdshow), click on the "Decoder" tab and make sure the decoder for Xvid is libavcodec. Our video examples are encoded using Xvid ; if you use your own videos you need to activate libavcodec for your own video formats.
• The video quality is very poor when I'm dragging.
  This is because DimP decompresses all video frames into memory to allow fast frame preview. Preview frames are downsampled depending on available memory. So the more available memory you have and the shorter your video clip, the less pixelized it will be. You can cut long videos using, e.g., VirtualDub (see instructions here).
• I have a problem not listed here.
  Please post to our discussion group.

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