What is frameserving?

[SupaCoopa]

I have heard about "frameserve from VirtualDub to TMPEG" but can't quite make out what this is or how it's done.
Any help?
Cheers to all

[willem]

With frameserving you can let for instance VirtualDub apply all kinds of filters to your avi and feed the result into TMPGEnc. You don't have to save the result to harddisk first. Usually it creates a fake file which you can load into your encoder. There is a guide under the Howto section on the left explaining how to frameserve from VirtualDub.
I used this for example to add subtitles to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. For me this was much easier than learning Chinese! So you see it's really useful. VirtualDub opened the avi with the Chinese audio stream and added the subtitles through a filter. At the same time it did a resize and added black bars to the top and bottom. With frameserving I didn't have to save it to harddisk first with potential quality loss but could feed it into TMPGEnc which created a VCD compliant MPEG for me.
You can compare frameserving with pipes in Unix (and DOS too). With pipes you can feed the output of program a as input to program b. You can try this under DOS:

type longtextfile.txt | more

The program type will show you the contents of the textfile. Without the pipe the text would scroll over your screen and you wouldn't be able to read it properly. The | is the pipe symbol. Before the | is the program that will create input for the program after the |. More will get the output of type and present it page by page. Before people get really smart on me; I know you can also do more longtextfile.txt but that wouldn't serve as an example.

I hope these examples help you understand what frameserving is.