I just need a simple program that, while playing a DVD on my laptop, I can pause the DVD and create a JPEG (or other format) off of the screen capture of that frozen moment. Note–not a screen capture of the laptop screen, but of the media I’m playing.
I know that there might be default functions that allow for this in certain media playback software that are standard on some PCs. If so, I’m interested in those answers (in case I have it but am not aware of it), but otherwise, need a basic answer on which programs can do this easily and inexpensively as a stand-alone purchase.
Please note–I am not interested in movie editing capabilities or more sophisticated image handling. This is a simple quality screenshot capture of the film when paused.
Any suggestions or recommendations for this generally computer-non-savvy Doper?
Both VLC and SMPlayer – both available for Windows – include snapshotting. One ought to set up the saves folder in preferences to somewhere easy to find.
Buttons can be added to the toolbar to press for instant snapshots.
Even Media Player Classic can do it - and that’s free too, same as VLC. You just press Alt+I and it’ll do it. I prefer doing it with VLC though as the controls are a bit more streamlined and it can also capture subtitles as well (you have to set it up in the settings first though). Ctrl+Alt+S does a screencap in VLC and for super easy gif making you can just advance frame by frame using E all by itself and screencapping as you go.
(if you are making gifs I recommend doing every other frame to save on file size)
Well, I do have Windows Media Player, but doing the alt didn’t work (tried ell, eye, and one; wasn’t sure which one you meant). Nothing while right-clicking either.
I don’t have VLC so I’ll have to figure out how to get it (since it’s free, I assume it’s a download?)
SMPlayer SMPlayer2
There’s no harm in having additional players, although one can only associate filetypes with the one one likes best — eg: make it the default player.
I prefer SMPlayer to VLC mostly, but SMPlayer2 ( a fork ) to either. SMPlayer and SMPlayer2 are basically wrappers for MPlayer, which by itself is rather simple.
I downloaded SMPlayer but it won’t play anything. It says “The CDROM/DVD drives are not configured yet.” When the window opens to configure, nothing works. I press “Scan for CD/DVD drives” and it does nothing. I select a DVD drive and hit “Apply” or “OK” and it still does nothing. It sits there, inert and not very helpful. I don’t mind working my way through instructions, but not if it tells me to do something that is completely unresponsive.
I also tried downloading VLC and twice, it went up to 44% and then locked up, not budging an inch (and saying expected download time is 8 minutes, for 20+).
Just for the record, Media Player Classic is not the same thing as Media Player - especially not the one that comes with Windows nowadays.
I always download k-lite for all my codecs and MPC comes bundled with that. However, if you do not need codecs then you can just go get MPC-HC here. I prefer MPC-HC for actually watching things over other media players because it tends to use less resources. And like I said, it does screencaps rather well (but not as well as VLC).
