Comments on: Taking screenshots of video?

Question: Taking screenshots of video?

mathowie — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:23:35 -0800

Anyone know of the best way to take screenshots of video on a PC? I notice that DVDs and mpegs and avis all seem to do a weird matte screen thing where video is projected "above" the video player on your screen, so all screengrabs are blank. There must be a hack to get a simple grab every now and then off this sort of video. Anyone ever figure this out?

By: agropyron

agropyron — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:34:02 -0800

I almost posted this to AskMe after unsuccessfully Googling for the answer about 5 times over several months. I decided to google one more time and I found the answer. :)

You have to turn off hardware acceleration in Media Player.

http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000154.php

By: smackfu

smackfu — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:34:17 -0800

The normal way is to disable video acceleration, the particulars of which are different for each app. Then it has to draw the video the same way as everything else, and a normal screen cap will work.

Or use Media Player Classic, it has a Save Image command that works sometimes.

By: AlexReynolds

AlexReynolds — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:36:41 -0800

If you're using a Mac OS-based PC, there's Snapz Pro.

By: DevilsAdvocate

DevilsAdvocate — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:52:10 -0800

By: kindall

kindall — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 12:11:09 -0800

Play the DVD with VLC?

By: majick

majick — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 12:26:14 -0800

Most sane media players will framegrab without much trouble, but if you want to do so from outside the player, you'll need to disable video overlay. Once you know that's what the feature is called, it's easier to adjust.

Depending on operating system and application, there are a number of different ways to accomplish it. Cranking down the "video acceleration" slider in the System control panel will probably take care of it system-wide, on Windows machines.

By: caddis

caddis — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 18:27:02 -0800

Thanks, I have been wondering the same thing recently.

By: Savvas

Savvas — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 19:36:10 -0800

The way I do it is to launch the video I want to get a screenshot of in windows media player, then while that's playing, launch another copy in a different player (I use media player classic) and then take a screenshot of the second media player.