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"Screen capture from DVD"

I know, I know I only ever come in here when I want sometihng...

Does anyone know of any free software I can get hold of to allow be to capture an image from a DVD playing on my PC?

I tried a regular print screen, but you just get black - or the moving image if it's still playing.

Any ideas?

Never known Power DVD fail to take a snapshot no matter what the settings.

Try Power DVD ver 5 if your using XP or older.

Just tried PowerDVD and it was greyed out, but once a movie is playing its available. I have a 9800 Pro so it might be due to that, as overlaying is on as I have the same problem with screen capture, its all black or if the movie is still playing you see the movie.

Odd. It's just plain greyed out on mine. Not tried it with the new ATI yet though.

Well I use overlay as I get nothing from printing the screen, yet screen capture in PowerDVD works.

That button never worked on my PowerDVD, I think it's disabled on machines using overlay, for the reasons below.

Or just use a program like PowerDVD which has a capture button, which can capture to clipboard, file aswell as putting the image as your desktop image.

That's because video overlay is enabled - it works a bit like "green screen" in the movies. Windows places a (nearly) black box on one section of the screen, and sends the images of your desktop to your graphics card for output to the monitor. Meanwhile your graphics card is also decoding your DVD, and it's been told by Windows to replace every pixel of that (nearly) black colour with the newly decoded DVD data. The result is you can watch DVDs while having your graphics card bother about CPU-intensive DVD decoding by usings its hardware acceleration features, instead of decoding the DVD in Windows, which would make your system a lot slower..

The upshot of all this is you hardly ever really notice it, unless of course you want to take a screenshot - as you've experienced. All you get is the (nearly) black box where your DVD is, because that's (ultimately) all that Windows thinks is there. It's out of Windows's hands by the time you get to displaying your DVD.

The solution to this is to disable overlay mode when you're playing your DVDs. Of the various tricks to doing this, my favourite method is as thus:

Find a suitable video file somewhere on your computer. Any WMV or AVI will do, probably MPGs too. I always use a DivX that I usually have lying around.

Open the file in your media player, and make sure it's playing.

Now, open your DVD player, so now you have your first video file playing, and a seperate DVD player. If you use WMP/zplayer to play both video files and DVDs, just use two separate instances.

Now, if you play your DVD you'll find it's not playing in overlay mode, because your graphics card can only handle one overlay at a time, and that's been reserved by the first video you opened. You can now take a screenshot of your DVD without incident. Hopefully :-)

I know, I know I only ever come in here when I want sometihng...

Does anyone know of any free software I can get hold of to allow be to capture an image from a DVD playing on my PC?

I tried a regular print screen, but you just get black - or the moving image if it's still playing.

Any ideas?