Tip: VirtualDub crashing when selecting Preview?
 

I have a less-than-ideal setup for VirtualDub, Windows 10 (latest build), no integrated graphics card, just an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti, and multiple screens.

For the last few months I've ran into countless issues with trying to get VirtualDub to capture properly from a Pinnacle USB Capture device. Most of the issues were VirtualDub capture starting with "Overlay" mode, with a scrambled picture, and switching it to the usable "Preview" mode, it would either work, or crash.

If it crashed, I had to reboot and try my luck again. Sometimes it would take 30+ reboots to get it to work. Once I got it working, I would leave it open for at least a few days.

I've tried every trick in the book on this forum, video help, and others.

Today this was happening again and by accident I had VirtualDub on one of my side screens, and BINGO, it worked! I tried a few more reboots to confirm my findings and they were consistent.

My side screen is running 1440x2560 via Display Port, and my primary screen is running 4k via HDMI 2.1.

I wanted to share this knowledge in case anyone else runs into the same problem down the road.

Ah-ha, I bet this is an Nvidia card issue! Confirm your graphics card.

In Windows 7, with an Intel + Nvidia config, usually (sadly not always) you could control which graphics you wanted to use for the software (like VirtualDub), using the Nvidia control panel. Either the on-chip/board (integrated, iGPU) Intel graphics, or the Nvidia. Intel is stable, less "fancy", and worked best for this specific video capture task. Nvidia was too fancy and unstable, and would cause video software to crash (including VirtualDub, but far from only).

In Windows 8, 10, 11, it started to get more buried. Remember, Microsoft now considers it's users too stupid to operate computers, so does their best to hide or disallow functions. (Satya Nadella needs to be waterboarded for allowing Windows 10/11 to just randomly reboot for those "Updates" that can/does cause you to lose your work. That includes reboots while capturing video overnight.)

These are all reasons why Win10 is a total POS for video capture. You can force it, but you'll run into common issues with the OS fighting you, or even Nvidia fighting you (not much better than Microsoft lately). Great companies if you own the stock, but horribly obnoxious when actually using the products.

Anyway, yet another possible troubleshoot step for others, thanks for this post. :)

Yep, I'm using an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti. Unfortunately that is my only GPU as my build does not have an integrated GPU. I'm just glad I was able to get this working without completely losing my mind.