Taking screenshots of movies in "Media Players"

[SolidWing68]

I want to know if I can use a program, if there is one to take screenshots of movies I'd watch in like windows media player, real, etc..cause when I press prnt-scrn its just a black screen. Any help/feedback is good, thanks.

[tweedledee]

Play movie with powerdvd and use capture (camera) button. There are other programs that do it also.

[thecoalman]

If you have windows movie maker you can load the video into that. Make sure you place it on the timeline. In the preview window advance the video to the frame you want. Go to tools and select take picture from preview. A save as dialog box will pop up..... Make sure you put the movie on the timeline, I just tried it and got an error before doing so.

Most decent image editors have this feature. You load in the editor, switch to the program you want the screenshot of and hit the hotkey to capture it.

[adam]

You get a black screen when you print screen in media player because of overlay. To get around this, open a different clip first and let it play in the background. Then open up your clip and when you print screen it will work.

If you want the highest quality screen captures than you shouldn't use media player or any other software player. You should extract the images directly from the vobs. Rip the vob in question to your hard drive. From there you can load it in VirtualModDub, dvd2avi + avisynth + virtualdub, TMPGenc, etc... and access the frames directly. Vdub and TMPGenc have options to export frames as still pics.

[SolidWing68]

I just want normal viewable screenshots, plus I'm playing the videos from my hard drive, it's not like a dvd disc or or anything..

[adam]

Then follow my first suggestion. It does't matter where the video's are stored, if you are watching it then overlay is being used. But if you open another video first, then you can take screengrabs of the 2nd one.

[vh5150]

Virtualdub can output to a .bmp file besides .avi. So any file that Virtualdub can play, including any mods like VirtualdubASF or the MPEG2 mod of virtualdub can do it too.

With that .bmp file you can open it in any photo editor like photoshop and change that to a web ready jpg or png file.

I suggest that because you can do a frame by frame screenshot capture instead of sitting there trying to alt-print screen a movie scene and pasting that in M$paint or photoshop.

Frame by frame is better I believe.

[tweedledee]

plus I'm playing the videos from my hard drive, it's not like a dvd disc or or anything..

As I said before, install powerdvd,play movie, pause at the shot you want,make sure you are on the correct frame, and click on camera icon. No drama.

[vh5150]

With virtualdub you can choose any frame or frames that you want. No need to play a video to stop and guess the frame you want.