How To Make Screenshots

Things to consider: The preferred file format is PNG - it is a lossless format, so no image quality is lost when you take the screenshot. This means you can see the actual quality of the source. If you take screenshots as BMP format you can open a bmp in MSPaint and save it as a PNG to convert it. JPG is a lossy format, which means image quality is lost when taking a screenshot. They're alright to show people the content of the movie file, but do not reflect the actual quality of the source.

Windows Media Player

Press Ctrl + i and a save dialog will pop up. Select the file type (Jpeg or Bitmap) and choose where to save it.

Mplayer

Add the commandline option: -vf screenshot

While the video is playing, press “s” to take a screenshot.

VLC

VLC has to be configured for taking screenshots first:

• Find the “Settings” Menu and go to “Preferences”
• Select “Video” at the left
• Find “Video snapshot directory (or filename)” and click browse button.
• Choose a folder to save screenshots to.
• Click the “Save” button at the bottom left.

To take a screenshot during movie play go to “Video” Menu and select “Snapshot”.

Media Player Classic

To take a screenshot in MPC:

• Go to the “File” Menu → “Save Image…”
• Choose the file format (Jpeg or Bitmap), and where to save it.

If it doesn't work right, try this option first: Go to the “View” Menu → Options → Playback: Output → select the “VMR7 (windowed)” option. Then restart MPC.

Winamp

I don't know of a screenshot key or option in Winamp, so I only know the old fashioned way:

• In the Preferences menu select General Preferences: Video
• Uncheck “Allow hardware video overlay” (incidentally, the overlay is usually the culprit when you get black where a video should be)
• Now you can use Print Screen key to capture in full screen, or use Alt+Print Screen to capture current window.

Note that you will have to resize it if you capture in full screen, and you will have to crop out the window borders in window mode. Also, make sure the window you want to capture has the focus. Open Paint or whatever, paste the image, crop resize to a good size for posting, save in a suitable format like .png.

Irfanview

Taking screenshots in Irfanview works like this:

• Open the movie (select “all supported video files” or “*.*” for the file type).
• Find a good spot to make a screen shot then right-click, “copy” (ur use the little menu next to play).
• Next, select “Edit” Menu → “Paste”
• File Menu → Save As…

Resize if needed, and save to a suitable format.

VirtualDubMod

To take a screenshot in VirtualDubMod go to the “Video” menu → “Snapshot source frame”. A save dialog will pop up. Choose the format (tga, png or bmp) and save the file.

Side Note: autoGK comes with VirtualDubMod. It's great if you ever plan on making DVD → xvid. You can find a tutorial for meking dvd rips here.

BSPlayer

To take a screenshot in BSPlayer click with the right mouse button and select options > capture frame or just press “P”

Go to ImageShack and upload your image (or ImageHosting.gr if it's adult material. To let the image show up as a picture in your torrent description you need to use bbcode tags along with the url in the description or post like this:

[img]http://cinemageddon.org/cauldron/yourscreenshot.png[/img]

DON'T directly link to an image from another site (except for image hosting site). The image could end up later not working, or they might change it to “image leeched from blahblahblah.com” because they don't like you stealing their bandwidth. Some sites even change the image to something embarrassing or shocking. You can always just download the image and upload it to the image cauldron.

This conludes the tutorial on screenshots. Thanks and props go to SpiderDave who conceived the original version of this guide in the CG forums.