Capture a single frame of video in Windows Media Player
19 January, 2009
Turning off hardware acceleration will let you take stills of video
Just a quick one today, but a very useful one. Ever needed to grab a still out of a video to use as a placeholder graphic or something? Playing the video in Windows Media player and pressing print screen then pressing or paste in your favourite image editing application, will only get you the Windows Media Player frame with a big black void in the middle of it.
The solution is to turn off video acceleration as in the image above.
Simply go to Tools -> Options, then under the performance tab, slide the arrow all the way to none.
Now when you play your video and hit print screen, your resulting screen cap will actually have a still of the video.
Thank you – This worked like a champ! I was having a different problem–that when I tried to crop the print screen in Power Point and then move that cropped picture, the part that I cropped would change as if I was moving to a different part of the original picture. This worked great and thank you!