You are watching Star Wars on a DVD and wish you could capture some of those movie scenes as still pictures for using as a desktop wallpaper. Or you have a home video recording and want to extract photos from the video for printing.
That’s not tough. To capture snapshots of a video playing in Windows Media player, you have the following two options:
1. Use the Print Screen key but only after you disable hardware acceleration (drag the slider from Full to None) else all you’ll see is a black image.
2. If Option 1 sounds geeky, download a third-party media player like VideoLAN VLC, VirtualDub, Classic Media Player or the very useful GOM Media Player (~4MB). They are all free, available for most platforms and have inbuilt screen capture capabilities for video without requiring any tweaks.
What really sets GOM Media Player apart from competition is the Burst Capture feature that lets you capture screenshots continuously – you no longer have adjust the video play-head to get the exact video frame. And you can even create a sequence of images from one a video.
If the video is too dark or light, GOM will let you adjust the brightness and contrast before the screen capture. You can also change the image quality and file format. Pretty useful software. Thanks Molly.
Related: Screen Capture Tools, Extract Picture Sequences from Video
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/take-image-screenshots-dvd-movie-scenes/1719/
Tags: Archives, dvd, media player, screen capture, screenshots, Software, Tips, Tricks, Tutorials
Reader Comments
There is a better way to capture scenes:
If you are playing the video in Windows Media Player, you just need to press Ctrl+i and voila! now you can save the still scene in any image format you desire and it handily defaults to jpeg…its an inbuilt feature of windows media player and works with most of the video files.
Written by Pramod Ghuge on 11.02.07
Pramod – the Ctrl+I keyboard shortcut was available for Windows Media Player 9 and 10 but am not too sure if it’s still available in WMP 11.
Written by Amit Agarwal on 11.02.07
VLC can do this. Have you tried?
Written by Thejesh GN on 11.08.07
Control + i does work in Windows Media Player, even version 11. Cool trick! Now I do not have to disable hardware acceleration.
Thanks a lot
Written by Rey Mendoza on 01.09.08
Hey guys, thank u so much! i was hunting high n low on how to capture scenes from a movie. in vista, u just have to press printscreen, and it’s done, but in xp, it doesn’t work that way. so i moved the accelerator to zero and even control+i works. thanks :)
Written by anna on 08.06.08