[SOLVED] Trying to capture a screen and its behaving oddly

[corsair]

Hi there everyone :)
I have a small problem trying to capture a screenshot from a movie. I tried to capture the screen at one frame (paused), and the screenshot comes up but (I am trying to put this in a sensible language,hope I can get through),when I open up the capture in Paint Shop Pro 7 or even with the default windows viewer thingy, it shows the captured scene as off to the side by a considerable margin. I mean some of the image that I am trying to capture sorta 'spills out ' off the frame. I can move the image window around and thus end up showing the captured image to show the spilled out part of the capture to show up.But try as I may,when I save the pic as a picture file (I tried jpg and bmp formats),it ends up showing a black screen with the pic itself moved off the frame. I tried moving the video window to the side and it actually makes the pic inthe saved file move around in concurrence. Tried closing the movie file and the screenshot image goes black-is there a way that I can capture the screen without this weird link between the movie file and the screen shot? *Sorry for the long winded question*

[ebackhus]

That's because the video is not being rendered directly. I can't remember the exact setting and since I'm at work I can't dig further but you can change it so individual frames can be captured and inserted into other programs for editing.

[blah789]

Playback of video uses hardware acceleration to send video data directly to your monitor/screen, bypassing the video buffer, so that's why you get a black screen whenever you use prnt-scrn (it's not even black really - it's just a key - you probably noticed when you moved the image around, if the black area is where video is, you'll see "through" it). You could bypass that by turning off hardware acceleration temporarily (it works, but I don't recommend it, as it takes a big toll on performance - but here are the steps if all else fails http://www.deskshare.com/Resources/a...eleration.aspx )
Nowadays, many media players have a hotkey you can press to do screengrabs. I'm pretty sure many of the commercial DVD playback programs can do it (PowerDVD: http://www.downloadatoz.com/howto/ca...-powerdvd.html , WinDVD just press P I think and it's saved to captures folder in program files\windvd or wherever it's installed)
I prefer Media Player Classic Home Cinema: http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/
just play and press F5. You can even seek frame by frame to grab a specific frame.

The problem with overlays has been fixed in Windows Vista, and I think print scrn does grab even video and games in Vista and 7.

[corsair]

Ty for the replies, ebackhus and blah789. I'll go try out your suggestions, blah789 :)
Edit: I am trying out the Media Player Classic Home Cinema but am running into problems. The Output was set to "overlay mixer" which does not allow screen capturing. Am trying to change the output to 'system default' but on hitting F5 key it gives a 'GetCurrentimage failed, hr= 8000ffff" error. Am not sure which output to change into. :(
Edit 2 : Whee I tried out the output options and now it is working. Ty so much for your kind replies :)