Capturing a single frame from a DVD

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Guest

Can someone please direct me to the appropriate group for this question;

Here's what I'd like to do. Using my laptop and an external DVD drive
(since my laptop is not equipped with one) I want to capture and print single
frames from commerical DVD movies. I'm an artist and would like to use the
prints I make as reference photos for my painting. I've had conflicting
opinions as to what I need to do this. Someone told me all I need is the
external DVD drive whereas others say I need additional software, video
capture cards etc.

Thanks in advance.
Bison
 
You cannot do that if the DVD is copyrighted, as most are.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User
Microsoft Newsgroups

Get Windows XP Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/windowsxp/choose.mspx

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"Bison" wrote:

| Can someone please direct me to the appropriate group for this question;
|
| Here's what I'd like to do. Using my laptop and an external DVD drive
| (since my laptop is not equipped with one) I want to capture and print single
| frames from commerical DVD movies. I'm an artist and would like to use the
| prints I make as reference photos for my painting. I've had conflicting
| opinions as to what I need to do this. Someone told me all I need is the
| external DVD drive whereas others say I need additional software, video
| capture cards etc.
|
| Thanks in advance.
| Bison
 
Don't confuse the physically possible or impossible with the legalities.

And as for the legalities, it's not necessarily illegal. If he owns the
disc, and if the use of the image is for his own private non-commercial
use, it probably is legal under the fair-use doctrine.

Most DVD players have a "stop action" mode (or just pause) that freezes
the video. You could always feed the frozen video into a video capture
device, but this would not produce as high a quality as extraction of
the image from the MPEG2 data stream.
 
You need additional software. PowerDVD player has a frame capture function.
I won't get into the legalities of doing what you want to do as I am not
knowledgeable in that field.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
I don't know of an appropriate newsgroup in the Microsoft group.

Capturing single movie frames isn't something I usually need to do, but...

I use WinDVD 6 (http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/Home.jsp) to view DVDs. It has
a frame capture capability.

I have hardly used it, but I just tried it on a couple of DVDs that I
believe to be copy-protected. It worked fine on both, saving single frames
as jpegs. (.bmp also seems to be an option.) Apparently copy protection does
not prevent single-frame capture.

As far as I know, WinDVD has no hot key feature that would make this more
convenient. It appears to be done strictly using the mouse and pulldown
menus. The captured frames are saved to RAM, so you can grab a number of
frames in quick succession, to be saved to the hard drive at your
convenience.

PowerDVD (http://www.gocyberlink.com/english/index.jsp) also has a snapshot
feature. How that compares to WinDVD, I don't know.

I also have Nero Showtime installed. (That's a media player that is included
with the Nero CD/DVD burning suite.) It captures a single frame to the
Windows clipboard when the C key is pressed.

In short, I believe that all you'll need to capture single frames is an
ordinary DVD viewing application. (You'd need that anyway - Windows Media
Player can display DVDs, but only if a set of third-party codecs is
installed. WinDVD or PowerDVD is commonly bundled with DVD-ROM drives or
burners.)


Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.
 
Nero vision will do it on a commercial disk copy protection will not cause a
problem for a single shot.
 
Let me thank all the folks who replied to my question. I'll try the
solutions suggested. Once again I appreciate the quick response.

Regards,

Bison
 
Let me thank all the folks who replied to my question. I'll try the
solutions suggested. Once again I appreciate the quick response.

Regards,

Bison
 
Let me thank all the folks who replied to my question. I'll try the
solutions suggested. Once again I appreciate the quick response.

Regards,

Bison
 
Let me thank all the folks who replied to my question. I'll try the
solutions suggested. Once again I appreciate the quick response.

Regards,

Bison
 
Let me thank all the folks who replied to my question. I'll try the
solutions suggested. Once again I appreciate the quick response.

Regards,

Bison


Harry Ohrn said:
Here you go for the instructions and freeware to do it
http://people.stdnet.com/jonathan/Interests_RippingDVDStills.php

--

Harry Ohrn MS-MVP [Shell/User]
www.webtree.ca/windowsxp


Bison said:
Can someone please direct me to the appropriate group for this question;

Here's what I'd like to do. Using my laptop and an external DVD drive
(since my laptop is not equipped with one) I want to capture and print
single
frames from commerical DVD movies. I'm an artist and would like to use
the
prints I make as reference photos for my painting. I've had conflicting
opinions as to what I need to do this. Someone told me all I need is the
external DVD drive whereas others say I need additional software, video
capture cards etc.

Thanks in advance.
Bison
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