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Ok can someone help explain to me how i take a snap shot of a movie on my PC and save it as a JPEG? I apologize, i can imagine that it is pretty easy but i can't figure it out.

You need a player that can take screen caps. Media Player Classic works well for that, in my experience. Use the 'save image as' option under file.

Power DVD has a capture function. It'll work for any type of file that it will play, which is alot of types.

Some DVD programs might let you do it with the old print screen function, which captures a picture of the whole monitor, but on most that trick won't work.

Tsyroc wrote:Power DVD has a capture function. It'll work for any type of file that it will play, which is alot of types.

Some DVD programs might let you do it with the old print screen function, which captures a picture of the whole monitor, but on most that trick won't work.

Whyzat?

afaik, if you're using windows media player you can take screenshots if you turn the video acceleration under preferences down all the way. then you just hit print screen and it should show up fine.

WMP does it fine, just do Ctrl+I. Alternatively, C in power dvd (you have to go into the options first and tell it where to save them), Annoyingly, PDVD only seems to save them as .bmps.

RogueIce wrote:

Tsyroc wrote: Some DVD programs might let you do it with the old print screen function, which captures a picture of the whole monitor, but on most that trick won't work.

Whyzat?

Beat's me. Someone around her explained it once. I'm sure it's partially intentional so people wouldn't be taking screen captures on their own.

Rye wrote:WMP does it fine, just do Ctrl+I. Alternatively, C in power dvd (you have to go into the options first and tell it where to save them), Annoyingly, PDVD only seems to save them as .bmps.

I've always just used to camera button on the Power DVD player but I might have to start using Ctrl + C just to make things go faster.

It is annoying that the screen captures are .bmps and you don't have any option about it. I spend a fair amount of time converting pictures because of that. I'd probably have to do some of it anyway since I usually crop the photos so the "black bars" above and below are included in the picture (reduces file size).

In powerdvd, you only have to press c, not ctrl+c, sorry if that was unclear. WMP does them straight to jpeg though, unfortunately you can't do a lot in a row quickly by that method, as you have to tell it what you want to save as. You can deal with that by rapidly pausing and unpausing the pertinent parts though.

An older method of using hardware acceleration to display video was to do what is called an overlay. The video program will set the color of its window to, say, bright green (a color rarely encountered in normal usage). The video card is then instructed to paint the video onto the color overlay. This allows you to use some hardware acceleration in an age of non-programmable 2D GPUs.

This also means that when you think you're taking a screenshot you're actually taking an image of that green screen. Your video card has been instructed to paint anything that color with the video data, so it looks fine on your computer. If you try sending it to someone else they'll just see green or a bunch of random junk.

With the advent of cheap 3D cards there are other methods of accelerating video playback without resorting to the old overlay method. One possible method involves creating a flat 3D object (usually by paired triangles) on which the video is painted (MPC has this option, for example). No overlay trickery is used and thus you can take a screenshot at your leisure.

When it comes to DVDs most programs still use the overlay method to use the hardware acceleration found on most video cards made in the last six years or so. Thus, you have to use some program, such as PowerDVD or WinDVD, to tell it to output the video buffer and not the overlay. This accounts for the lag you might see when you drag around the window -- the GPU has to catch up to the changed coordinates for the overlay (AFIAK).

Xine, which is what I use, has this handy little camera icon on the control interface. Or I just press "S"...