Capture Frame of Avi File

[dbdg]

I upload quite a few 3D animations onto my site, I always take a grab of the screen using PSP, as the preview.

[Very non technical explanation of issue below]
NormallyI use PSP's capture function or sometimes just the PrintScreen key, works most of the time, lately I have been having issues though, I'll paste the image into PSP and it'll look like everything is ok but if you move the image in PSP I can see that all it is doing is showing the avi through image, like the image has a whole in it and I can see the actual avi though it.

How can I capture a frame without this issue?

[J1NG]

If you don't have any other software to do it for you. Try to switch the Windows Media Player to Software mode (by pulling the video acceleration all the way to the left in the options/performance tab). This will force the video to be done by software, and make it grab-able by PrintScrn.

J1NG

[dbdg]

It works.

Cheers J1NG.

[J1NG]

No problem.

J1NG

[Jon P. Inghram]

ffdshow has a rather comprehensive frame grab feature: it can grab the current frame, frame x, every x frames, and every x frames between y and z. It'll save 'em as jpg, bmp, or png.

[spadnos]

You can also use ImageMagock to extract a single frame, and save it in just about any image format (and also crop, rotate, adjust, watermark, etc).

You basically just load the avi, and use a bracketed subscript for the frame number you want: AviFile.avi[27].

- Steve

[Maggi]

uhm ... http://virtualdub.org/

vdub let's you export single frames and sequences in either TGA or BMP format

or am I missing something obvious, that you are going the screen capture route ?

whe you said, you could see the avi through parts of the captured frame, is that avi still running in the background ?

if so, the "transparent" part of that picture is most likely using the exact RGB values, that you gfx card uses for video overlay, so it looks as if there's a hole in your picture, but in fact it's just showing one solid color

[dbdg]

Yes, the 'hole' only appears when the image in PSP is directly over the playing movie. If you move the picture around in PSP and move it too far you can't see through. It's more like mplayer is buring a hole in the apps above it.

Cheers for all the suggestions but for what I need (single frame for thumbnail purposes on my site) reducing the peformance tab as suggested by J1NG works a treat.

[TnT]

VLC Media Player lets you change video output overlay which will allow you to do a print screen.

[Dr Mordrid]

And if you have any kind of video editing software they almost always include a frame export function.

Dr. Mordrid