Ctrl+Alt+Print Screen

[Huggy2000]

I have a DVD containing many scenes that are worthy of screen capturing. Unfortunately, something doesn't like me doing it with the usual ctrl+alt+print screen copy thing.

I can initially paste the image into Paint or Fireworks and save it as a .jpg , but as soon as I restart the film to get to the next scene, the pictures :icon_tong up. I've also noticed that when the film's playing, the pasted image is playing as well :doh

Methinks M:censored:soft have had a hand in this somewhere :( Could someone tell me how to make my computer not do this please :)

[Laf]

Download 'Screen Print 32'. I've used it in the past and found it to be very useful for screen capture. You should have no problems capturing movie screenshots with that....and it's free.

[Huggy2000]

Cheers mate. Will try that now :D

[Win2Win]

ctrl+alt+print actually records the capture in memory, you then have to paste it into another utility, or use Paint.

[GlosRFC]

There are a number of reasons why you might have problems capturing an image from a DVD.

If you're using a DVD player that relies purely on software, then it will use DirectX to draw the display instead of the normal GDI that Windows usually uses. That's the same approach that games use and I'm sure a number of you have seen those glitches you occasionally get when you try to alt-tab and a ghost image of your game can still be seen on your monitor.

If you're using a hardware decoder, either stand-alone or one built into your video card then, daft as it sounds, when you play a DVD on your PC what you're seeing isn't actually on your screen! That's because the DVD signal is overlaid on top of the normal video signal that your PC sends to the monitor. You can see this in action if you switch your monitor to a lower resolution, say 256 colours. Play a DVD and you still see millions of colours - go back to Windows and your resolution is still only 256 colours.

Some makes of video card are better at recognising this different decoder signal and are able to capture images which are passed to the GDI so that they can be manipulated in graphics programs. Also some software DVD players are able to capture images - Intervideo WinDVD 4 is one example.

So, depending on your circumstances, you either need to:

a) change your video card (recent nVidia cards seem to have no problem capturing DVD content correctly)
b) acquire DVD capture software that can handle DirectX calls
c) use a player that has frame capture built in.

[Huggy2000]

Ta for that as well :)