How to get a video screenshot

December 13, 2004 6:08 PM

I know I've done it successfully in the past, but I just can't seem to take a screenshot that includes a Windows Media or Quicktime video that's playing.
posted by davebush to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Lots of programs that display video use a technique called chroma-keying to display it - Windows puts up a box of a specific color where the video is supposed to go and the video driver/card fill it in with rendered/decompressed movie frames. (This is especially true now that most video cards nowadays can do a lot of the decompression work on the chip, as opposed to making your CPU do it.) As far as Windows and its buffers are concerned, there's only the box (usually blue). Use a program like TMPGEnc to do a freezeframe on it.. it's really not for that but it can display movie files a frame at a time and it does not use hardware to decompress or render the video. I've been moderately successful with it. You might also try other apps (maybe windows movie maker?) that can edit video.. I'm thinking maybe WinDVR or something.
posted by mrg at 6:24 PM on December 13, 2004

mrg is correct. I generally use PowerDVD in Windows to do the same thing.
posted by signalnine at 6:28 PM on December 13, 2004

The general way to get around this is to disable hardware acceleration in the player. In WMP, it's under Performance in the Options. YMMV.
posted by smackfu at 6:40 PM on December 13, 2004

Are you just trying to get a frame grab of the video itself? Most media players (like WMP) can copy the image to the clipboard.
posted by neckro23 at 6:42 PM on December 13, 2004

This Q is familiar. I usually get round this by running two copies of media player, or just play a movie in a web page and run media player. There's only one screen grab defeating overlay on video cards usually, so the player that started second should be grabbable from. Awful grammar, very sorry.
posted by Flat Feet Pete at 7:49 PM on December 13, 2004

smackfu's method is similar to the one that's worked for me; however, I was taught to disable hardware acceleration in the OS.

In Windows, right-click on the desktop and choose "Properties". In the Display Properties control panel that pops-up, select the "Settings" tab, then click the "Advanced" button. Then choose the "Troubleshoot" tab. Set the "Hardware acceleration" slider all the way to the left ("None").

Screencaps of Windows Media Player will now include the video image. Return the setting to "Full" after you're done so you're taking advantage of your graphics hardware.
posted by filmgoerjuan at 8:09 PM on December 13, 2004