What is a .VDR file?
A .VDR file is a special kind of video file used by a program called VirtualDub, which is mainly for editing movie clips that are in the .AVI format on computers that run Windows. Think of a .VDR file like a container that holds video data, frame by frame, which can then be changed into a format that other video editing programs can understand and use, thanks to settings made in VirtualDub.
To open a .VDR file, you can use VirtualDub itself. However, there are also other programs that used to work with .VDR files, like PEGASYS TMPGEnc and Custom Technology Cinema Craft Encoder, but it's important to note that PEGASYS TMPGEnc is no longer available.
VirtualDub has a special feature called Frameserver. This feature creates "dummy" .VDR video files. These aren't regular video files; instead, they are opened in a different video editing program and shown one frame at a time. This is a bit like serving video frames on demand to the editing program.
Even though .VDR files are being handled in the background by VirtualDub, they appear and behave just like any regular video file you might find on a Windows computer. Sometimes, you might see a .VDR file with an extra ".avi" at the end, like ".vdr.avi". This is done so that video editing programs that only recognize files ending in ".avi" can still work with these .VDR files.
VirtualDub has a way to make Windows treat .VDR files almost the same as .AVI files, thanks to something called a proxy handler. However, this might cause issues with some other programs, making them not work as expected.
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