screen capture and wmp/divx players....

[mito]

If an mpg/avi is playing I can't capture its content. I know this has something to do with direct video access... Any way to surpass this detail?

 

[carpediem]

mpc has a screencapture hotkey that writes a file to bmp.

(media player classic)

 

[mito]

Thanks again!!!

why doesn't window's Paint program capture the screen entirely? I'd like to read technical info....

Thanks again.

 

[carpediem]

It's because it doesn't capture direct draw (i think)

it draws the video on an overlay. The only thing captured is the overlay.

 

[mito]

Can we state that Microsoft decided to cancel this function to avoid screen shot piracy?

Windows Media Players 8, 9 and 10 do not appear to have this function...

 

[carpediem]

Can we state that Microsoft decided to cancel this function due to avoid screen shot piracy?

Windows Media Players 8, 9 and 10 do not appear to have this function...

I think most media players draws to an overlay

 

[Fruitfrenzy]

Screen grabs of video usually don't work because the video is being displayed using a hardware overlay. That means that the video data is stored in a different area of video memory from the rest of the desktop and the display pipeline of the graphics chip does the job of reading the data from both locations and compositing it (also scaling the video etc).

If you want to do a screen grab one way to do it is to start up a simple mpeg clip in media player before starting the video you want to grab. That will take the overlay hardware for the first clip. As long as you have a half decent graphics card it will be able to present the video with the 3D hardware which you can grab as normal.

I don't think there are any cards currently available that can do more than 1 overlay window concurrently.

 

[_xxx_]

You can use Virtual Dub to save the video as a sequence of pictures. Or you can use a proggie like PowerDVD for capturing individual frames (PowerDVD can play .avi files)

 

[rashly]

If you lower the hardware acceleration level of your graphics adaptor (I dont know by how many notches) you can take screenshots using the print screen key.