Capturing a Still from a homemade DVD

Factual Questions
1

I have a homemade DVD that I would like to take a still frame from.

How do I go about doing this?

I have a Dell E1705 with Windows XP with Media Center.

Thanks

2

Pause the video at the scene you’re after and take a screen shot by pressing ctrl+print screen.

Then open Paint and paste the image. While in Paint you can crop and do a few other types of simple editing.

For most faithful reproduction save as .bmp; for smallest file size save as .jpg.

3

I think that should be alt+print screen to capture the active window.

4

Print Screen doesn’t always work with DVD playing software - you just get a black rectangle (I think it happens because of the way they render to the screen), but many of them now have a built-in ‘snapshot’ function hidden away in some menu or other.

If your DVD software has no such facility, you could use VirtualDubMod to open the video files (the big .VOB ones in the video_ts folder on the DVD), seek the frame you want and save it as a bitmap.

5

The site Videohelp describes a lot of tools used for video editing. You may be able to find something there.

6

My experience is that the JPG generation in Paint sucks. Just MHO.