AVIsynth guide

The AVIsynth guide
by Rob & Jim

Part 1 : The Avisynth guide
Part 2 : Using with Adobe Premiere and TMPG
Part 3 : Using with FlasKMPEG (Xmpeg)
Part 4 : Using with FlasKMPEG and CCE

The official AVisynth home page is now maintained by Edwin at:

Videotools.net

Rob has a great Avisynth experience:

Ask him for help

Part 1

AVIsynth is a scripting AVI tool, this means that you write a text file and you open it like if it was an AVI file.

Why to use AVIsynth ?
What is AVIsynth ?
Where to get AVIsynth ?
Install AVIsynth core DLL
Test your installation
Install the Video Server
The magic of the frameserver
Using VirtualDub filters in AVIsynth scripts
The manual from Ben
The AVS patch
The plugins for AVIsynth
A collection of scripts

1. Why use AVIsynth ?

Using a scripting language can help in:

repetitive tasks (like resizing, deinterlacing, subtitling a logo),
conversion (it avoids creating large intermediary files),
workaround (open MPEG-2 stream in VirtualDub, open bugged AVI),
and AVIsynth offers some good filters as well for advanced users.

Using it as a frame-server can be useful to chain several video processing softwares, such as AVI editors and MPEG encoders. Even if these softwares are not designed to interface with each other.

AVIsynth is a powerful tool for advanced users but thanks to this guide, desktop video beginners should be able to use examples to process their video clips easily.

2. What is AVIsynth ?

AVIsynth is a free Win32 application, which offers different modules:

scripting tool (a DLL working as frame server),
Adobe Premiere plugin which is also a plugin for Dvdx, and (with another name) a plugin for FlaskMPEG.

Once AVIsynth components are properly installed, it works as a frame server in between applications. The AVIsynth frameserving principle is illustrated Figure 1:

When a video application opens an AVS file (a script which describes a video file), the avisynth.dll starts working. It reads the script, loads the plugins, opens the video and audio sources and the communication with another application (Premiere, FlasK or DVDx), executes filtering and dubbing and serves the resulting audio-video stream to the application.

The AVIsynth application has been written by Ben Rudiak-Gould for Win32 platforms. Rudiak-Gould is also the creator of the very popular Huffyuv codec. He has frozen his development since October 2000, asking for donations. Edwin Van Eggelen has taken over some few maintenance for AVIsynth and registered a GNU GPL project at SourceForge.

3. Where to get AVIsynth ?

Since Ben Rudiak-Gould has frozen his contribution, it is difficult to find the latest stable release of the DLL and plugins. To help, we have established this table to list the main archives and we have grouped these files in the labDV pack, Avisynth2001c.zip:

So, you can get the AVIsynth archives from the labDV pack or their original sites.

4. Install AVIsynth core DLL

The Avisynthv104.zip from Edwin contains:

To install AVIsynth:

copy avisynth.dll into your Windows system directory (//Windows/system for Windows 98 or //WINNT/system32 for Windows NT and 2000)
double-click on install.reg to register the DLL

5. Test your installation

Unzip the version.avs from the avscollection.zip (see collection below) in a folder of your choice and open it with Windows Media Player:

Yes! The 1.0 beta 4 shows 1.0 beta 3, don't mind.

6. Install the Video Server

You will find the plugins and the codec in the VideoServer.zip archive from Edwin:

The installation is done by copying the Cm-avisynth.cm.prm into the plugin directory of Premiere.

The installation is done by copying the CM-Avisynth.cm.flask into the Flask (Xmpeg) directory.

Copy the aviwrap.dll and Aviwrap.inf in a folder of your choice. Right-click the INF file,
and select install.

If everything went okay you can find the codec in:

(...)