How to make a 2-pass XviD video in VirutalDub- by Static_Fiend

This is just a short and simple tutorial on how to do 2-pass XviD videos in vdub.

First off you'll, obviously, load up VirtualDub and the video in which you want to encode. I'll be using this 2 second video of KISS.

Next you'll want to go into the video menu and select compression, and you'll be presented with this screen. Your codec list may look different from mine, but no matter!

Go ahead and select XviD MPEG-4 Codec from the list, click configure, and you should be presented with this.

Next we'll want to select Twopass - 1st pass from the list. Now select the more button right next to the twopass box and you should get this. Of course your stats file won't be the same name as mine, but go ahead, click the "..." next to that and save the file, keep discard on and click okay. Note you'll only need to do this your first time encoding something and never again.

Now click okay until you reach the main VirtualDub window again, go ahead and click File -> Save As AVI.

Just name the file whatever you want, and click the little button that says "Don't run this job now". I generally add a "-1st" for the first pass so it can be just discarded later.

Now for the second pass, go back to Video -> Compression, and click Configure on XviD again to bring this back up. This time we'll want to select Twopass - 2nd pass. Now we have two options here, we can click that "Target bitrate (kbps)" button to change it to "Target size (kbytes)" and vise versa, this is largely up to you. I generally use Target bitrate and keep it at 300 for things that don't need much (NES/Nethack/anything generally super old), and 1000 for things that have a lot more going on (almost all 3D games). For target filesize you can use a calculator to figure out the size by multiplying the number by 1024 to get megabytes. The calc button next to the field will help you figure out how big the file will be with audio and overhead added in but this is slightly more complicated.

Before we leave, make sure you click the "more" button right next to "Twopass - 2nd pass" and make sure it's pointing at the correct stats file, everything else you can leave alone. Also again you will only have to do this your first time.

Just for demonstration sake I'll keep the 1000 kbps on and go back to File -> Save as AVI, and like the previous pass we enter in a name and keep the "Don't run this job now" button clicked.

Now with that all ready to go, hit F4 on your keyboard or go to File -> Job Control, which will look like this. You'll see at the very bottom your videos are "waiting", just click start and it'll encode.

With that, you're done! Now you can delete the first pass video (asdf-1st.avi in this example), if the second pass video isn't quite up to snuff for you, you can go back and repeat these steps. If for some reason you get an error, make sure the dimensions of the video aren't odd (for instance 641x481 is a no-no, but 640x480 is fine) and that the stats file is being found.

This largely will be similar with all codecs, but I used XviD as my example.