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How I take screencaps
Jun. 11th, 2003 05:38 pmSince I've had this question asked five or six times now, I'll make it an entry that I can refer to in the future.
The question in question being "How do you take your screenaps?".
The short answer is "I use MPlayer's dump-to-disk output driver". Since that's not all that helpful, a longer answer follows.
To begin with, my private machines all run FreeBSD. Trying to use Windows usually gives me fits of rage, so I avoid using it unless someone pays me to. I have no idea how helpful any of the following will be to those of you who do use Windows.
Anyway, I put a DVD in the DVD-ROM drive on my stationary box and fire up MPlayer. I look through the episode (or movie, as the case may be) until I see a scene that looks promising. When I find one, I note the timecode, stop the playback and re-run around the noted time until I know if I do want to capture from it, and if so how many frames. I then tell MPlayer to start at a given time and dump a certain number of frames to disk, re-scaling and image processing as it goes. The number of frames can vary from as few as five (a single interesting still image) to several thousand (all of Tara's song in Once More, With Feeling). Once I have the frames on disk, I step through them with an image viewer (I used to use the tried and true xv, but recently switched to feh), copying the better ones to a "staging" directory. Then, I go on looking through the episode. Once I've finished a disc or so, I look through the staging directory again, deleting the images that aren't good enough. That done, I finally write captions and upload the lot to my website (the webserver then builds the index pages and creates thumbnails on the fly (my website has an absolutely silly amount of automation behind it for what is basically a vanity site)).
While this is a lot more work than just looking at the movie and occasionally hitting Print Screen, I think it does produce better images. It also makes it a whole lot easier to get those images that flash by in a fraction of a second. Sometimes the difference between an interesting image and a dull one is very brief.
The question in question being "How do you take your screenaps?".
The short answer is "I use MPlayer's dump-to-disk output driver". Since that's not all that helpful, a longer answer follows.
To begin with, my private machines all run FreeBSD. Trying to use Windows usually gives me fits of rage, so I avoid using it unless someone pays me to. I have no idea how helpful any of the following will be to those of you who do use Windows.
Anyway, I put a DVD in the DVD-ROM drive on my stationary box and fire up MPlayer. I look through the episode (or movie, as the case may be) until I see a scene that looks promising. When I find one, I note the timecode, stop the playback and re-run around the noted time until I know if I do want to capture from it, and if so how many frames. I then tell MPlayer to start at a given time and dump a certain number of frames to disk, re-scaling and image processing as it goes. The number of frames can vary from as few as five (a single interesting still image) to several thousand (all of Tara's song in Once More, With Feeling). Once I have the frames on disk, I step through them with an image viewer (I used to use the tried and true xv, but recently switched to feh), copying the better ones to a "staging" directory. Then, I go on looking through the episode. Once I've finished a disc or so, I look through the staging directory again, deleting the images that aren't good enough. That done, I finally write captions and upload the lot to my website (the webserver then builds the index pages and creates thumbnails on the fly (my website has an absolutely silly amount of automation behind it for what is basically a vanity site)).
While this is a lot more work than just looking at the movie and occasionally hitting Print Screen, I think it does produce better images. It also makes it a whole lot easier to get those images that flash by in a fraction of a second. Sometimes the difference between an interesting image and a dull one is very brief.
