Tuesday, February 22, 2005
MULTIMEDIA :: Taking Screenshots Of Videos
Most folks, even the most braindead of twits, have played a video on their computer once or twice in their travels around the web. A few diehard nerds have massive collections of movies and videos on their PC that were downloaded from the Web or ripped from DVDs etc. For the most part, playing a movie on your computer is pretty commonplace these days. Shoot, you'd be hard-pressed to find a computer from Dell or HP that doesn't come with a DVD-ROM drive, at the very least. But what if there's a scene in a movie you've just watched that you simply MUST send off to your best bud on the Intarweb? So sorry, Alt-PrintScreen just doesn't work. Take the screencap, then paste into your favorite image editing program, and all you get is the outer frame of the player window with a black area where the video screen capture should have been. Nerts.
But wait! There's a way around this! You can easily take screenshots of video if you take a couple of steps first. Now, if you have a really slow machine that has a difficult time playing video in the first place, this trick is going to really put your poor 'puter to task. Just remember that before you follow these instructions and then email me with "You jerk! My computer thing just gave me an error and stopped working but I don't know what the error was because I just clicked OK and now it won't work at all!"
In this example, I'm going to assume that you can already play the video correctly. I'm not going to try to walk you through the nightmare of making sure you have the right codecs to play the movie you downloaded, but I AM going to use a downloaded movie as an example.
There are two programs in which this trick is possible, as far as my experience goes. The first I will look at is Windows Media Player 10, which is included with Windows XP. If you're running Windows 2000 or 98, skip to the next program down.
Windows Media Player 10
- On the top toolbar, click Tools, then click Options.
- Click the Performance tab
- Down near the bottom, underneath the Hardware Acceleration options, click the Advanced button.
- In this window, uncheck any checkboxes that are titled "Use overlay". Overlay is a method of speeding up video playback by creating a "layer" for the video window that sits "over" the regular desktop. This is why captured frames come out black when you paste them from the clipboard.
- Click Ok on every button on the way to closing all the windows.
- Play your favorite video, and pause it at the point you want to capture the screen (I would recommend that the video be in fullscreen mode at this point), and hit Alt-Print Screen.
- Open your favorite image editing program (Photoshop, Paintshop, MS Paint etc) and create a new document, then just hit Ctrl-V to paste the clipboard contents to the new document. (In Photoshop, hit Ctrl-N to create a new document that is already sized to match the image in the clipboard.)
That's it for Media Player.
Now, for you other fruitcakes (I'm one of those, thank you very much), there is another program called Video Lan Client for Windows, or just VLC for short. This program is simply badass. It includes nearly every codec you might ever need to play nearly every video file created by nearly everyone on the Web. That's a lot of nearlys. Incidentally, if you try this program, and find the three videos on the web that this program won't play, don't come crying to me, because you likely tried to play a RealMedia or Quicktime file with it, you dink.
So, now you've got this handy dandy quick-like-a-ninja video player program installed. Once again, just trying a quick screen grab as it sits is going to result in more heartbreaking black screen goodness. With VLC, all you need to do is change the shortcut a little bit.
Video Lan Client
- Right click on the VLC program shortcut on your desktop (the little orange and white traffic cone with the little curved arrow at the bottom left of the icon) and click Properties
- In the "Target" line at the top, you're going to add the option "-- nooverlay" to the file path already in there. For example, mine looks exactly like this: "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --nooverlay
- Click Ok, open your movie with it, and double click the video window to get it fullscreen, hit Alt-Print Screen at the part you want to capture and paste into your favorite image editing program.
Simple as that! Now you can screencap any video that you can play with those two programs. Of course, if you are trying to capture from a DVD, I highly recommend PowerDVD. It's default capture hotkey is "C". Hit the C key at the right moment (or pause the video to make double sure you get it right), then, again, paste the clipboard contents into an image editing program. You can also set PowerDVD to capture directly to a file instead of to the clipboard, so you don't even have to pause your movie. Just hit C until you're blue in the face, or until you run out of hard drive space, whichever comes first.
Happy screencapping!
Deadweasel makes a hobby out of burning earwigs with a magnifying glass.
But wait! There's a way around this! You can easily take screenshots of video if you take a couple of steps first. Now, if you have a really slow machine that has a difficult time playing video in the first place, this trick is going to really put your poor 'puter to task. Just remember that before you follow these instructions and then email me with "You jerk! My computer thing just gave me an error and stopped working but I don't know what the error was because I just clicked OK and now it won't work at all!"
In this example, I'm going to assume that you can already play the video correctly. I'm not going to try to walk you through the nightmare of making sure you have the right codecs to play the movie you downloaded, but I AM going to use a downloaded movie as an example.
There are two programs in which this trick is possible, as far as my experience goes. The first I will look at is Windows Media Player 10, which is included with Windows XP. If you're running Windows 2000 or 98, skip to the next program down.
Windows Media Player 10
- On the top toolbar, click Tools, then click Options.
- Click the Performance tab
- Down near the bottom, underneath the Hardware Acceleration options, click the Advanced button.
- In this window, uncheck any checkboxes that are titled "Use overlay". Overlay is a method of speeding up video playback by creating a "layer" for the video window that sits "over" the regular desktop. This is why captured frames come out black when you paste them from the clipboard.
- Click Ok on every button on the way to closing all the windows.
- Play your favorite video, and pause it at the point you want to capture the screen (I would recommend that the video be in fullscreen mode at this point), and hit Alt-Print Screen.
- Open your favorite image editing program (Photoshop, Paintshop, MS Paint etc) and create a new document, then just hit Ctrl-V to paste the clipboard contents to the new document. (In Photoshop, hit Ctrl-N to create a new document that is already sized to match the image in the clipboard.)
That's it for Media Player.
Now, for you other fruitcakes (I'm one of those, thank you very much), there is another program called Video Lan Client for Windows, or just VLC for short. This program is simply badass. It includes nearly every codec you might ever need to play nearly every video file created by nearly everyone on the Web. That's a lot of nearlys. Incidentally, if you try this program, and find the three videos on the web that this program won't play, don't come crying to me, because you likely tried to play a RealMedia or Quicktime file with it, you dink.
So, now you've got this handy dandy quick-like-a-ninja video player program installed. Once again, just trying a quick screen grab as it sits is going to result in more heartbreaking black screen goodness. With VLC, all you need to do is change the shortcut a little bit.
Video Lan Client
- Right click on the VLC program shortcut on your desktop (the little orange and white traffic cone with the little curved arrow at the bottom left of the icon) and click Properties
- In the "Target" line at the top, you're going to add the option "-- nooverlay" to the file path already in there. For example, mine looks exactly like this: "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --nooverlay
- Click Ok, open your movie with it, and double click the video window to get it fullscreen, hit Alt-Print Screen at the part you want to capture and paste into your favorite image editing program.
Simple as that! Now you can screencap any video that you can play with those two programs. Of course, if you are trying to capture from a DVD, I highly recommend PowerDVD. It's default capture hotkey is "C". Hit the C key at the right moment (or pause the video to make double sure you get it right), then, again, paste the clipboard contents into an image editing program. You can also set PowerDVD to capture directly to a file instead of to the clipboard, so you don't even have to pause your movie. Just hit C until you're blue in the face, or until you run out of hard drive space, whichever comes first.
Happy screencapping!
Deadweasel makes a hobby out of burning earwigs with a magnifying glass.
