Blu-ray Disc screen capturing problems

[Animated Ben]

Hello!

I'm Ben from the news and reviews website Animated News & Views. On our front page I posted the problems we've been having with Blu-ray Discs...

http://animated-views.com/2009/more-tom-and-jerry-tales-plus-blu-ray-help/

...and someone in our forums pointed me in this direction.


As I say in the link, I'm not the most techincally minded of people, but I have been searching around for a solution to this issue on VideoHelp for around two hours now, looking in the How To's and Format Conversions, but there isn't a "Blu-ray to JPEG", for instance, so I didn't seem to be getting closer and thought it was best to post here.

Basically, I have the LG super combi drive built into my PC and thought I would be able to capture screens for illustrations in our reviews with PowerDVD, but as you all know, they have disabled that function on BD playback.

I have tried a Print Screen and it won't even post a picture with the black video on it. I tried running a Windows Media Player video in the background, to use up the hardware acceleration as someone suggested in a topic here, and PowerDVD wouldn't even start up, saying that I didn't have the required graphics capablities. Closing the WMP video then allowed the PowerDVD Blu-ray playback to work fine...but again without being able to capture an image.

I have no use for large image sizes and am not worried about not capturing at full quality - the images we use are shrunk down to 225px in height and whatever width they require (a 225px high screencap works out much less than 720px wide even for the widest screen ratio).

What I'm after is a piece of freeware that will allow me to either playback a BD and grab selected images, OR nifty capture device that will capture ANYthing on my screen and allow me to paste into an image program to crop and size down. I see a few of those out there, but none of the specifically indicates they will include capturing Blu-ray images playing back within the PowerDVD window.

Is this a DirectX kind of issue? I have no idea what that is, but seem to have picked up that this is usually the kind of playback that results in the black frame. In this case, the PowerDVD (v7.3) doesn't even allow the image to be captured in the first place.

Sorry to barge in with such a big request straight away...and I hope this post is appropriate for a newbie, but help!

Thank-you!

[Baldrick]

I don't think you will find any easy free method to do it.

I guess the TotalMedia Extreme blu-ray player($120) has such a function but no trial available.

ANother method would be to use a blu-ray decrypter tool like AnyDVD($100) and then can you open blu-ray m2ts files in other players like Media Player Classic and save screenshots(File->Save Image).

[jman98]

PowerDVD and WinDVD (I think screen capture for BluRay is disabled here too, but I'm working from memory here) used to have this feature. Want to know why it got turned off? Some blogger figured out that it worked and posted some blog about it. Hollywood completely flipped out about it because, theoretically, someone could take a photo of every frame in the movie and re-assemble them to "copy" the BluRay disc. Of course this supposed method does nothing to capture audio and I don't know anybody who programmed a way to take all those screen captures necessary to make a movie out of them. Hollywood demanded that PowerDVD and WinDVD take that function out of their players and both caved in and did it. I stopped buying either years ago because it just seemed to me that each release got less functional than the one before it as Hollywood started mandating consumer unfriendly changes in release after release of both programs.

I have seen screen captures from BluRay discs so it is possible to do so, but I don't know what is used to do it. I've seen them on various BluRay review sites.

[Animated Ben]

Continuing to dig into it, it seems all those sites are acting illegally and ripping the BD contents off the discs, converting them to another format from which image capture is more easily achieved!

What I can't work out is why good old "Print Screen" for Windows users doesn't work?

There are some grabber programs out there that suggest they can capture anything on your screen, including games and such, but until I see one that specifically says "yes, BD" and that it works I'm hesitant to try.

Is someone working on something like this or able to confirm that one of these works with BD?

[racer-x]

One way I know that works, because I do it all the time, is to use KMPlayer. It won't play the Blu-Ray folder, but you can open any m2ts file and play it directly. Then it's a simple matter of going to the frame you want and hit CONTROL + C to copy the frame to the clipboard. Then paste it in your image editor. Don't get the latest version, go for an older version around v293xxxxx.

It's a very good free player and you can find older versions here:
https://www.videohelp.com/tools/KMPlayer/old-versions#download

[jagabo]

What I can't work out is why good old "Print Screen" for Windows users doesn't work?

Because Hollywood and Microsoft intentionally make it NOT work. They use a technique called Video Overlay. The player makes a hole in the desktop and the video is displayed through that hole by the graphic's card's hardware. When you hit Print Screen you get the hole, not the video that's playing behind it.

There are some grabber programs out there that suggest they can capture anything on your screen, including games and such, but until I see one that specifically says "yes, BD" and that it works I'm hesitant to try.

If you find one you should look very closely at the fine print. I bet you will find that they only work with Blu-ray discs you produce yourself without any AACS and BD+ copy protection.

[Animated Ben]

Thanks for the pointers!

I will check that out and see if I can manage to open those files. At the moment, though, any BD I put into my drive does not show up in My Computer, and when I try and "Explore" or "Open" I get a "No disc in drive" message.

Once I install KMPlayer, would I be able to navigate to the disc's content from there, using the program, or would I need to copy or drag the files over?

If so, I'm not sure how I would access them because for some reason the disc contents are "invisble"...yet more Hollywood studio interference I assume!

[jagabo]

I'm pretty sure KMPlayer won't see anything Windows Explorer can't see.