recommend some video capture software?

Cafe Society
#1

I have to “design” DVD covers for movies that have no covers; usually this is when a cheapo box set has some generic cover and no film-specific artwork in the packaging. Sometimes I can find images on the web–someone on eBay is usually selling the original poster, or something. But sometimes I come up dry. In those situations, I’d love to be able to take a capture from a frame of the film, but I’m unable to do so; standard PrtScrn doesn’t work on video images.

As far as I know, my intended use is perfectly legal. So can anyone recommend some freeware that will allow me to do an image capture from a DVD?

Thanks in advance.

#2

The DVD player software that came with my drive can do still captures. There’s probably thousands of freeware players that do the same thing. Have you tried googling this?

#3

You can do this with many DVD player programs, or if yours can’t, try Videolan’s VLC. You can play almost any audio/video format in it and set it to slow-motion and then take a snapshot. I don’t think you can go frame-by-frame, so it helps if you have a quick finger so that you can get it to stop at the frame you want. This is not too hard if you play it pretty slowly.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

#4

Yes, I have, and I’ve tried a few. So far they all A) suck, or B) cost a lot of money. Videosnapshots Genius seems to work OK, but it’s $30. In this post-Netflix world, the video store I work for makes zero profit, so there’s no money for such luxuries; all new software must be free.

#5

The resolution on a DVD image is extremely low quality, for anything much more than showing a frame as a video capture.

Media Player Classic has a “save image” function, and can play back DVDs in a limited fashion.