How to Capture Screenshots from Windows Media Player
Grabing a screenshot from Window Media Player is not so easy as it seems. Yesterday I tried to use the extremely useful screen capture by ‘Print Screen Key’ to try to capture a wmv running file on my Windows media player classic V10. But whenever I tried to use the print screen, a blank image was captured from the windows media player.
Screenshots from Windows Media Player
Then I thought maybe the running video was posing a problem with capturing a frame. So I paused the movie and tried the print screen technique. But still got a blank screen.
Then I tried to capture paused and running movies in full screen (Full screen shortcut – using Alt+Enter). But again no luck.
So I decided to tweak some advanced options of Window media player. After lot of different combinations of tweaks, still had no luck.
Looking to buy a professional multimedia software to do the job? There are several shareware and paid professional image capture software available which can do the job. But why should I pay when I should try to get a freeware or get a tweak to fix it myself. I tried to see how professional paid software’s for this worked, but I was disappointed the moment I captured the screenshot. It had a big logo on every image it captured. Of course it was shareware and you needed to pay to remove the text messages.
Free simple way to capture Images from Windows Media Player
- Open Window Media Player
- Then go to Tools | Options
- In Options, select the Performance Tab
- Way below you click on the Advanced Button
- Uncheck “Use Overlays’
- Click Ok
- And you are ready.
Now run your movie in any size or screen resolution. Use the standard ‘Print Screen Key’ Method as described and you have captured a snapshot from your favourite movie on windows media player without using any special multimedia software. Enjoy!
More Ways to Capture Screenshots from WMP
Update: Some users have given excellent suggestions in the Comments which provide an alternate method if this does not work.
- Instead of the Print Screen Method – try pressing “CTRL+I”. This pops up a save as window after capturing the screenshot
- After you open Window Media Player. Go to Tools | Options | Performance Tab. You will see a picture similar to the first image above. Reduce the “Video acceleration” from the default Full to None, click ok and then close down media player. Next open the file you want to take a still using the Print Screen method – from press ALT and the PrintScrn key to copy an image of media player to the clipboard.
actually, my friend was in a job interview with ATI and the guy asked him why it appears blank and why. My friend drew a blank. The reason as explained by the interviewer is something due to the video card rendering the video directly , but your windows desktop is in 2d mode and that is done seprately, so when you do screen captures, you only get the 2d content. The reason why disabling hardware acceleration works is becasue you are now forcing the computer to render everything in software, the 2d content along with the rendered video.
You are great!!(Hong Kong)
ohmygod I love you.
No, no, really, I do.
This is a fabulous thing, who knew you could tweak with WMP and be able to print screen things? I Should sell your idea; do you mind? lol
Thanks so much for the tip. Really appreciate your efforts. It works great to save the image to the clipboard, but once I paste it into photoshop it seems that the image and the player are two separate images. If I try to crop the player out, it results in some strange clipping and if I try to save the image as a .jpg it comes up black. If I try to just capture the video image in paint without hte player border using the select function it doesn’t keep the frame of video in the highlighted space. Any ideas?
I tried both ways :
1) unchecking “use overlay”–
still get blank screen
2)pressing Ctrl+I but it does not bring up a Save Captured Image dialog
I am using Window 98 and WMP is version 9.
Could someone assist me?