INTERACT FORUM

it used to be...

i remember doing this with avi files. there was a way to capture the current screen shot and set it as the thumbnail for that file. presumably if you can do that you can find the image itself and then print it...

anyone remember how to do this / tell me where or why its gone...

I don't know if it's possible to do what you're asking in MC. The previous two posters are talking about using an image from the file as a thumbnail, not printing the image.

The first thing I'd try is just pressing "printscreen" on your keyboard. This will take a screen capture of the entire desktop and save it as an image to the clipboard. Open an image editing program like PhotoShop, Paint Shop Pro, or even good old Windows Paint, and click "paste". Probably, however, this won't work, because DVD playback programs play the video in what's called "overlay mode". In overlay mode, the video is inserted directly into the screen's video stream after the video memory, thereby speeding up playback (since there's no need to write to video memory). PrintScreen probably takes its screen capture from video memory, therefore it won't see the DVD's video. If you use the printscreen key and the place where the DVD video should be is all magenta colored, then this is what has gone wrong.

Some DVD players have a screen capture function. PowerDVD has a button that you can click to take a capture of the video. This might be the easiest way of taking the capture.

I also use a program called Capture Pro to do screen captures. Normally, this program doesn't capture overlay video (just like printscreen), but if I do a capture in "DirectX Surface" mode, it seems to capture the DVD video just fine.

Hope this helps...

Ton

what was suggested by ianG and myself allows you to use it as a thumbnail or to save it as an image.

just try it out...

pause > move cursur over image> right click > theres an option called 'grab to file' or similar, use that and save where you want.

remember this wont work on .vob files, they need to be mpeg, avi or similar.

if your trying to do this off a dvd itself it could be hard
if its off a .vob file on the drive just remane it as an mpeg

easy!!!

I am sorry, but I just tried that again and I don't see an option for "grab file" or something like that. Are you talking about MC 10 ?

I can't speak for pipsqueak, but I'm using V10.

Ian G.

i do think that whether this options exists depends on the type of video file...

I've done it with avi and mpeg, but if the requirement is to capture from DVD it must be mpeg2.

Ian G.

You can probably do that with TMpegEnc...

VirtualDub (particularly certain variants of it for DVDs) or DVDx can do the cutting and converting... but then you'd need something else to put them back together; I don't think they can.

PS
I think the free Fair Use program will chop DVD to DivX bits but I don't know about rejoining.....

For editing an MPEG2 stream you probably want to use Avisynth.  (I'm a bit biased )

www.avisynth.org