Capturing stills from video.

[Pretorius]

Hi,

What I want to be able to do seems fairly simple. I want to be able to play a video on my PC, whether from DVD or from an avi/mpg file on my harddrive, and capture still images from it.

The snapshots kept coming out as solid black.

I figured out that this was because of 'hardware acceleration'. I turned that off in WMP and was able to capture stills, BUT I was suddenly unable to move to any given point in the video when it was played from the harddrive.

Surely this can't be so complicated.

I've been using SnagIt.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[lubo4444]

i think VLC player can do that.

 

[PC eye]

Some players have the option for still images like Cyberlink's PowerDVD with a camera icon seen on the menu bar while running that in a window not full screen. Faststone is a freeware that surpasses Snagit and others by a long shot. You can try out at http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

 

[Ben]

Some players have the option for still images like Cyberlink's PowerDVD with a camera icon seen on the menu bar while running that in a window not full screen. Faststone is a freeware that surpasses Snagit and others by a long shot. You can try out at http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

Faststone is what I use also. I highly recommend it.

 

[Pretorius]

i think VLC player can do that.

Yeah, I use that and I saw that function, but I can't find any of the images that I've supposedly captured.

 

[Pretorius]

Some players have the option for still images like Cyberlink's PowerDVD with a camera icon seen on the menu bar while running that in a window not full screen. Faststone is a freeware that surpasses Snagit and others by a long shot. You can try out at http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

Thanks, I'll give it a try. Will this allow me to capture stills from video without turning off hardware acceleration?

 

[Pretorius]

No, that's not working. I'm still just getting running video that becomes a solid black rectangle when I close the media player.

For the amount of stills I see all over the internet this process can't possibly be so difficult.

 

[The_Other_One]

Media Player Classic allows you to

 

[Pretorius]

Thank you! That's working. Is there any way to capture them in a higher resolution? They're quite small by default.

 

[PC eye]

Faststone is not something like PowerDVD or WMP where you can always grab stills from everything especially when you are running it full screen. Once you press the hot key you have to save each capture individually to a folder. It just makes it possible to grab screens that other program fail to do.

In pc games someone pointed me to GameCam and GameCam Lite that records video clips while in a game. You then take stills while reviewing them in what else? Powerdvd in bmp format unilt using some program like Irfanview to open a bmp or png file to save as a jpg. Or WMP.

Some programs or utilities do allow for a few different resolutions only. Since there are only so many standardized you have a limit there unfortunately. I know it's annoying to see a small square making stills from GameCam in XP and posted a corner of a window type size rather a normal looking full screen.