DirectX Frame Grab/​Screen Capture

I’d been frus­trated try­ing to cap­ture par­tic­u­lar images from the films I’m watch­ing in The Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion list. DirectX tech­nol­ogy makes it hard to do a sim­ple screen cap­ture and paste into Pho­to­Shop. But some­one finally directed me to a way that works and doesn’t involve down­loaded spy-​and-​adware full pro­grams. And damn if it isn’t easy.

My lap­top runs Win­dows XP, so this should work for any com­puter run­ning that OS.

  1. Open Dis­play Properties
  2. Select the Set­tings Tab
  3. Select the Advanced button
  4. Select the Trou­bleshoot­ing Tab
  5. Drag the Hard­ware Accel­er­a­tion bar to “none”
  6. Select Apply

Now paus­ing a DVD in WMP or what­ever DVD pro­gram you use and doing a screen cap­ture [ALT-​PrintScreen] should result in a still image that can be saved. Just remem­ber to turn hard­ware accel­er­a­tion back on after you’re done.

Comments on this post

  1. Pete

    Alter­nately, if you don’t want to shut off hard­ware accel­er­a­tion, I’d rec­om­mend using the excel­lent VLC media player. It’s free, open-​source, and has screen-​cap func­tion­al­ity built into it.

    Cool site you’ve got here, btw.

  2. Adam Harvey

    Thanks for the com­pli­ment and tip, Pete. I’ll down­load it and give it a whirl. It is a shame it didn’t appear on Down​load​.com or come up eas­ily on a Google search.

    Do you know if it sup­ports frame-​by-​frame advancement?

  3. Pete

    Hrm.. not sure about the frame-​by-​frame. I know you can slow play­back way down, though, which should at least make the play/​pause func­tion­al­ity a bit bet­ter for get­ting spe­cific frames.

  4. Adam Harvey

    That’s bet­ter than the pause and pray method I’ve been using with WMP. Thanks again for the help.