Snapshots From .wmv File

[RSLancastr]

I have some rather large .wmv files, and would like to capture some stills from them.

When I play the with Real Player, if I try to use PrintScreen or Alt-PrintScreen, when I paste the result into an image editor, the screen portion of the real player is black.

I;m assuming this is because PrintScreen uses some copy of the video image stored within the OS, while the RealPlayer is wrigint directly to video memory, or something of that nature.

Regardless... does anyone know of a cheap (read: free) utility for capturing stills from .wmv files, which would work on a clunky old PC (it's a Pentium II) running Win98?

Thanks to any who can help.

[Donks]

Well, you could play them with Windows Media Player and use PrintScreen or Alt-PrintScreen. Worked for me, but I use WinXP, don't know if it'll work in Win98.

[FFed]

I have never had the print screen work on video files with winxp, so I use Axialis Mediabrowser.
It is shareware for 30 days though. The program works great for screen capture and supports 50 different formats.

http://axialis.com/download/mb.html

Minimum requirements are:
Pentium® class CPU - 350 Mhz
65636 color Video Card - 800x600
64 Mo RAM
Microsoft Windows® 95, NT 4.0 or more.

[RSLancastr]

Donks:

The Alt-PrintScreen still gives me nothing but a blank Windows Media screen.

FFed:

Thanks for the recomendation, but it doesn't work for me. I downloaded and installed it, loaded the .wmv file and tried the File/SaveSnapshotAs, but it results in the error message:

Unable to extract picture from movie. This operation is not supported by device.

Hmmm. Maybe it is my video card that is the problem. Odd.

[bangdazap]

Nevermind

[Ian Osborne]

If you have access to a Mac, just press Shift/Command 3 to take a snapshot of your desktop, which appears on your Hard Drive as a pict (Classic OS) or on the desktop itself as a PDF (OS X).

[Rat]

It's not so much your video card as its drivers that cause this. DirectX uses and overlay for video to improve performance. Thus you will just get the underlayer (black or sometimes green) if you do a printscreen.

The easiest way around it is just to use any old video editing software. If you can export to avi, there are various utilities that will extract all frames as bmps or whatever, but, as you can imagine, this can take a very long time and run to dozens of GiB with a large video.

Cheers,
Rat.

[FFed]

Originally posted by RSLancastr

Thanks for the recomendation, but it doesn't work for me. I downloaded and installed it, loaded the .wmv file and tried the File/SaveSnapshotAs, but it results in the error message:

Unable to extract picture from movie. This operation is not supported by device.

Hmmm. Maybe it is my video card that is the problem. Odd.

Too bad :(

You can try this one. I have never used it before so I can't say how it works.

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/moviesnapshot.html

[RSLancastr]

Thanks, all.

I guess it's my setup at home that is the problem.

At work, a simple Alt-PrintScreen does the job just fine, capturing the actual video frame rather than just the black background.

Yet another reason for me to buy a decent computer one of these fine days.

[webfusion]

Yeah, like this one:

http://www.powermax.com/imagedata/image_50x50/appl_mac_mini.jpg

______________________
BYODKM

[moopet]

Ok, all you boys and girls who can't get PrtSc to capture anything from a video window in Windows, the solution's simple:

Use Windows Media Player, and before playing the movie, and this is the important bit, go to the preferences dialog and turn all hardware video acceleration off (move the slider all the way to the left) That'll fix it.
With no hardware acceleration it doesn't try to write directly to video memory (sometimes referred to as "overlay"ing video) and PrtSc can therefore "see" the contents of the window, which would otherwise be empty - bypassed.

Happy snapping :)