Video frame capture with Windows Media player

Grabbing frames from a video with window media player

When you want to grab a single video frame Windows media player can get the job done. Windows media player is Microsofts solution to play videos on your PC computer and it is installed with all Windows XP and Windows Vista PCs. Windows media player is probably the most used media player program in the world.

If you try to grab a video frame with print screen in Windows media player or any of the many screen capture utilities all you will get is probably a black screen. The problem is that that almost, or I would say all, video cards use a special layer for videos rendering. The video is really displayed overlayed on top of the media player window. What you get when you capture or print the screen is really what is displayed behind the video, probably not what you want. The reason for things working this way is performance. Dedicated video hardware is able to play high resolution videos at a good framerate without slowing down your computer or eating your laptop battery. The downside is that you can not capture video frames from the overlay.

Changing options

In the Windows media player program we need to do some changes to the default options. Open up the options dialog from the tools menu. Under the performance tap you will see an advanced button that you need to click. On the advanced dialog page uncheck the "use overlays" option. Now restart Windows media player and see if you can grab video frames with the print screen button. If this still does not work there is a second thing you will need to try. Again open up the performance tab and disable hardware acceleration all together. Again you need to restart Windows media player for this to have an affect.

Codecs

Windows media player has a plug-in system to add support for additional video formats. When you need support for a new format or a format that is not supported by default in Windows media player you can search for a new plug-in. Plug-ins are called DirectShow filters but it is best to search for codecs. In Windows XP and some Windows Vista versions MPEG-2, the DVD format, is not supported by default. When you install a third party DVD player you will most probably get the needed plug-in and will be able to watch DVD files in Windows media player.

Batch video frame capture

With Windows media player you can capture single video frames but if you want to do batch captures of several videos at a time you have to use a different program. Fast video indexer can do batch video frame capture and it uses the same plug-in system as Windows media player. If a video plays in Windows media player you can also batch capture video frames from it with fast video indexer.