Screen Capture Software

[HAVocINCARNATE29]

I'm looking for a screenshot program that can take pictures of a video that is playing. For example, if you open windows media player, real player, etc. and play a clip, and then you try to take a screenshot of the computer, the area where the video is playing just shows up black.

Anybody know a good (preferable freeware) program?



Thanks!

[junkie]

I have SnagIt 6 and I can capture video with it. Here is the URL:

www.techsmith.com

They have an evaluation copy you can use.

[phrodu]

i dont think snagit will work on that because its showing you the blackness because the movie is playing strait to the monitor from the graphics card (or something like that). i read about this while i was trying to take a screen capture of a dvd. I had to get PowerDVD to do this so im sure theres some sort of program out there. try to google it and see what you get

[Sastraxi]

This is called OVERLAY. It is used so people can't capture streams. However, this is simple to get by!

Simply go into Display Properties, Settings, Advanced, Troubleshooting. Drag the slider down the to left fully (no acceleration). Now, start up a player and take a screenshot. This works because overlay is a feature of the hardware, and if you have no hardware acceleration you can't have overlay.

Make sure to put the slider back to its original setting afterwards, as this can make games chug and video capture (ex. TV cards) not work at all.

[agent]

Overlay wasn't invented to keep you from capturing streams, it was invented to display video extremly fast.

The way it works is the program draws a box of a specific color (in wmp's case it's 16,0,16 (r,g,b repectivly)). then the program sends a command to DirectX (i think it is) that turns on overlay and give the dimentions and position of the (almost) black box. DirectX tells the video card to replace the color 16,0,16 with the video. This is completely independant of the GDI. The video is moved directly to the video card's memory (and then to the screen) with windows none the worse for the ware. Windows doesn't know that anything other than an (almost) black square is being drawn, hence no window updates, hence no CPU usage, hence fast video, and also the ability for tv tuner cards to continue to update the screen even when the computer has been frozen (this works in windows 98 when the mouse is frozen)

all wmp needs to do is pass the video info to what windows thinks is an off-screen buffer, but is actually video memory

most newer cards support overlays, but some older ones don't

[Sastraxi]

Agent: It doesn't use DirectX, as most operating systems have support (Macintosh, Linux, *BSD, etc). And I didn't say it was invented to prevent people from capturing streams, it's just a common usage.

[HAVocINCARNATE29]

so then as long as i have the graphics card set to do video acceleration, i can't do a screen capture because the video will bypass windows and go strait to the graphics card?

[siyan]

Originally posted by agent
Overlay wasn't invented to keep you from capturing streams, it was invented to display video extremly fast.

The way it works is the program draws a box of a specific color (in wmp's case it's 16,0,16 (r,g,b repectivly)). then the program sends a command to DirectX (i think it is) that turns on overlay and give the dimentions and position of the (almost) black box. DirectX tells the video card to replace the color 16,0,16 with the video. This is completely independant of the GDI. The video is moved directly to the video card's memory (and then to the screen) with windows none the worse for the ware. Windows doesn't know that anything other than an (almost) black square is being drawn, hence no window updates, hence no CPU usage, hence fast video, and also the ability for tv tuner cards to continue to update the screen even when the computer has been frozen (this works in windows 98 when the mouse is frozen)

all wmp needs to do is pass the video info to what windows thinks is an off-screen buffer, but is actually video memory

most newer cards support overlays, but some older ones don't

it also passes position information (of the window that contains the video), however no window clipping info is passed.

thus, open paint and fill it wiht 16,0,16. then play a video in WMP, and move mspaint overtop of WMP, and you'll see video in mspaint.

[Sheppe]

Agent,

That was very informative. Thanks.

[agent]

another interesting effect is if you have windows xp and you have the mouse cursor shadow turned on. if you can find a program that uses overlay and allows the cursor shoadow to be displayed, the shadow becomes opaque over the video.