FWIW my take on VFW vs Direct Show is that VFW, despite MS trying to kill it off, presents a sort of interface other software can easily tie into. DS in contrast is more complicated, with a lot of variables the coders at Adobe &/or Sony Media for example can't take for granted. With DS you've got individual filters [if you've used Graph Edit you know about these] that have to be chained: something to open the file -> something to demux -> something to decode both streams -> and so on...

Windows & Wmplayer etc try to do this more or less automatically, with varied success, using whatever's available -- i.e. for mpg2 playback might use Cyberlink, and if that's disabled, Nero, & if that's disabled then the Sony Media MC codec. Unless a NLE was hardwired to use a certain set of files [as I believe Prem Pro & Vegas do with mpg2] I imagine DS decoding would be pretty sketchy, depending on whatever the user had installed. Codecs like PicVideo are DS, but also provide the VFW *Interface* NLEs like prem pro & Vegas need to communicate with it.

At any rate ffdshow AFAIK tries to tie into / use several codecs and apps to provide playback capabilities without having to go through and install everything separately. Installing all these is a bit iffy because of potential conflicts -- even though ffdshow tones down the risk, can still happen as you'll see googling. I don't know what's required.to use it for encoding, and when or how it works.

HUFFYUV will work in Vegas, as will wmv, xvid, divx, some mpg4, some h2*, and so on. ffdshow itself is DS & VFW, which is why Vegas sees it I think:
From : http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=173941

"ffdshow is a DS filter and VFW codec for many audio and video formats, such as DivX, Xvid and H.264."

However Vegas itself is RGB, whereas most of these codecs can work in YUV, which is often the default. As Sony states in their knowledgebase, huffy needs to be set to suggest RGB, same as xvid. Don't know if this works with ffdshow, but can set individual codecs in Vegas with vid on the timeline by going to the render dialog, selecting avi, then opening the customize dialog -> set the compression to the desired codec, & click configure. After clicking OK to close the customize dialog, the render can be canceled.

The PicVideo codec includes a small utility that does the same thing, or open the Compression dialog in VirtualDub.

Thanks mikkie. I was aware of the usefulness of DirectShow filters within Vegas, which is why I decided to finally experiment with exporting versus importing, however, I never thought about the transfer between YUV and RGB and what it effect it may have on the rendering process. I'll mess around with the configuration and see what I can produce.

Has anyone else ever noticed / used the ffdshow option for rendering? Does anyone know, or is this just completely untapped?

I have submitted a Question to Customer Service, but we'll see how far a smiley can take you! :)

This question is not system specific to my install and, as far as I have seen, it appears in multiple machines which range from Vegas 6.0+ installs to the latest Vegas 7.0d Build 192 install.

The reference number for my question is 070226-000007, which means that James Bond will handle my request! Woohoo!

Just transmit render process from Vegas via Debugmode frameserver to any third-party ffdshow rendering application.
For example to russian's free http://www.winnydows.com/xvid4psp.html

I would find Debugmode's frameserver much more worthwhile if it could frameserve from Vegas to ffmpeg :)

COuld be wrong, but if I remember correctly currently ffmpeg is a set of code to be used by other coders in their projects -- meaning you can find several front ends, and hopefully one of them will match your needs exactly.

I installed the CCCP (combined comunity codec pack), and was able to render in FFDS Xvid.

That's awesome shadowblast101, did you customize anything to get that working? According to my latest support ticket:

Hi Jonathan,

So I'm guessing ffdshow does not appear by Vegas. So, if you could share some information on how you set it up, or maybe the *.reg file of your export preset from ffdshow, it would be greatly appreciated!

Johnathon,
You can download and use "SUPER" to do many conversions.
Great program. If you want to convert some videos to the H264 Codec use the PS3 template. Set the video_bit_rate about 4 times lower than the source video.

Thanks for the suggestion, 4eyes. I was interested in making the render right out of Vegas, so Super (which is an awesome tool) would just be doing what a lot of other tools I already own do :
The closest thing to what I wanted can be achieved via DebugMode's FrameServer, but even then, the ffdshow application can not read the streaming AVI file. If there was a way to get window's ffdshow or the command line ffdshow tool to access and convert the frameserved file, then I could design a small app that contained a chunk of presets and configurable settings to work with FrameServer. Otherwise, I just want to get the ffdshow export working, somehow. Maybe there's an option I'm missing.