Making screen caps of a DVD on a PC

Factual Questions
1

I saw this thread, asking for Mac software, but I’ve got a PC, and the software linked to in that thread (of which I’ve tried FastStone Capture) doesn’t seem to work for me.

So to start from the beginning, I’m looking for PC software that will allow me to take screen captures of a DVD and make them into JPEGs.

The problem I’m having with FastStone Capture, for example, is that it allows me to take the screen caps and manipulate them (crop them, etc.), but when I save them, the saved file opens up and shows a black square. It doesn’t save the DVD’s image. If I save it as a .png file, it’s even stranger – it’s like the opened file acts like a little movie screen, in that if I change what’s playing on the DVD screen, my saved screencap changes to whatever the new image is.

Clearly, I don’t know what I’m doing. Help?

2

I am pretty sure SnagIt will work.

http://pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,3289-order,1-page,1-c,alldownloads/description.html

Have you tried plain Alt-Printscreen? It captures the image from the current window and you can just paste the captured image into any graphics program and save it however you like.

3

In my experience this does not work, but there’s no harm in trying.

Do you have PowerDVD? It tends to come with a lot of DVD drives and systems these days. It has a button right on the control panel for capturing a still from a video.

If this is just a short-term project, you can get a 30-day free trial of PowerDVD to try it out.

4

Oooh, PowerDVD worked! Thank you so much!

I didn’t try SnagIt, but I’ll give it a shot when the PowerDVD trial period is over. Yeah, alt+printscreen doesn’t work. Well, it appears to work at first – you can grab the image and mess with it any way you want, but when you save it, whatever you’ve saved just turns into a black box when you open the file again.

5

Glad to hear PowerDVD worked.

It’s all about hardware acceleration. In most cases, when you watch a DVD, Windows blacks out an area of the screen and then pipes the video output of the program directly to the video card, which paints where Windows didn’t. (or something like that).

A side effect is that when you hit PrintScrn, Windows takes a picture of everything it knows about on the screen, including the aforementioned black rectangle.

One way to get PrintScrn to work is to go to your video card properties and turn off hardware acceleration. This will force it to use the regular video APIs that the rest of Windows uses, thereby showing up on screen shots.