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[The Mastermind]

Are there any codecs that will allow me to take screen grabs of mpeg and rmbv videos?

I'm not having any luck at present.

Cheers.

[JimH]

Pause playback in MC and right click on the screen.  You can get a screengrab there.

[The Mastermind]

Thanks, I have been using pause but it isn't working.

When I right click with RMBVs, screengrab isn't given as an option.

When I right click with mpegs, Media Center crashes altogether, I don't even get a menu.

[JimH]

Thanks, I have been using pause but it isn't working.

When I right click with RMBVs, screengrab isn't given as an option.

When I right click with mpegs, Media Center crashes altogether, I don't even get a menu.

Check under File Types how the files are being played.  It must be MC native or DirectShow for this to work.

[The Mastermind]

Thanks, that got me half way there. It's working fine with the RMVB files.

However, I'm still getting a crash whenever I right click on an MPEG file. In fact Media Center crashes when I press stop while playing an MPEG file or hit the red X to close the program. It seems pretty unstable in that respect.

Cheers.

[Alex B]

Are the files MPEG1 or MPEG2? Could you post your DirectShow graph?

(right-click the display during playback and select "DirectShow Filters > Copy graph info to clipboard")

[The Mastermind]

Right clicking causes a crash.

An update on the situation is that not all MPEGS cause the crash, it so appears.

When I change the view in the folder that I store the files in to details and add the column codecs, they are listed as not having any codec. Whereas the files that don't cause a crash do have listed codecs.

I guess that has something to do with it, but I don't know what.

I'm considering trying to convert them, but I don't want to lose any picture quality.

[Alex B]

Oh, I see. (I thought that the crash occurred only when the video was paused and you tried to do a grab.)

Obviously at least one of the DirectShow filters is not working correctly with those files. This may be caused by the combination of more or less "bad" files and filters.

What is your Windows version? Have you installed any DirectShow filters?

Can you describe the file contents? Do the problem files have anything in common. For instance: are they small, big, DVD quality, created by a digital camera or downloaded, etc?

For checking the file contents you could try MediaInfo. (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/MediaInfo)


For fixing the unstable behavior you could try the Gabest MPEG splitter from the DirectShow Filter Pack (http://www.degeelebosch.nl/corone/) and CCCP for installing FFDShow (http://www.cccp-project.net/)

After installing you would need to configure the FFDShow video decoder to decode MPEG (the "libavcodec" option is recommended here: http://www.degeelebosch.nl/corone/dsfp/main.htm#ffdshow_config)...

... and set MC to use the installed splitter and video decoder filters for the MPG file type.


Recording file conversion there are ways to demux and remux the contents (i.e. rebuild the container without re-encoding), but actual re-encoding will always affect the quality (more or less). When done correctly the results might be fine.

[The Mastermind]

Cheers, I'll try those steps in a moment.

Looking at a couple of associated XML files tells me that they are MPEG 1.

As for source they come from a variety of programs and locations.

[The Mastermind]

Thanks.

I changed to the Libavcodec and the mpeg splitter and it's working now.

I appreciate the help.

[The Mastermind]

I seem to have gone backward with the RMVB files.

I had to reinstall Media Center due to some computer problems.

Now RMVB files won't play under any codec other than the Real Player engine.

When I play RMVB files under Direct Show I get blocks of colour that look like a screengrab of an unusually bad Atari 2600 game.

It's odd because when I switched to the Direct Show filters before, getting the RMVBs to play was simple. Now I have used dozens of filter combinations to no avail.