I remember how cool it was when we stabilized our first videos back in 1999 at university using Flint on a Silicon Graphics O2. A review from 1998 ...
All of this performance in a package less than $40,000. Wow.
digitalcontentproducer.com
Makes me smile now. Back then stabilizing was a complex task with lot's of manual work. Some years later Optical Flow came up and made things a lot easier. This technique is able to analyze movements in movies and automatically stabilize it. Better plugins for example for Shake were about 4000USD.
Finally, today we have VirtualDub and its DeShaker Plugin. Both are open source and free. Zero USD. And I think the results are stunning for a zero configuration solution.
This makes this technique much more accessible. Here's the manual (scroll down).