Capturing DVD screenshots

[drfsupercenter]

But how is it good for screenshots if it's the wrong size and interlaced?

[anonymez]

it's ideal, particularly wrt steve83's question:

What about for the highest quality & resolution captures

software players typically do bilinear resizing and realtime deinterlacing imo can't be compared to the likes of tdeint+eedi or mvbob. i mentioned accuracy since players/decoders like cyberlink's have that CLEV crap that screws with levels. frame stepping is also troublesome in many players.

vdub/dgdecode allows for better resizing (bicubic) and deinterlacing via avisynth. the average user may or may not notice the difference however.

[Steve83]

I resize & crop with Paint all the time. It's certainly not the most efficient, but I like the accuracy. I can also do some reasonably fine editing with it - at least good enough for 300dpi DVD covers & 600dpi disk artwork. I use it to extrapolate artwork to fill in the centers of disk art so it fits small-hub printable disks, and to change artwork & text on covers. I also find it useful for reducing/increasing color depth & working with icons.

Again: I'm NOT saying it's the best, or even efficient - just that it WILL do the job.



But if you say xnv is vastly superior, I'll check it out. Once I find the program, is there a guide somewhere about how to start using it effectively?

[anonymez]

it has a help file & support forums

[Steve83]

Yeah, I installed the full version, so I have the Help, but I didn't notice any forums. I've been messing with it for a few hours last night & today, and it doesn't seem to be suited for what I need. I can use Paint to remove speckles, resize sections of an image, move & crop sections, and then reassemble the image to the proportions I want. I can sample colors & then use them to fill or blend away blemishes, and copy randomly-shaped areas to edit the image. I can draw geometric shapes in any color, with some control over size/shape/thickness.

I haven't found where xnv will do any of those operations, but it is VASTLY superior in changing resolution down OR up, so I can certainly use it. I'll try its capture function soon.

*****EDIT*********
I've poked around the forum looking for a guide and didn't find one, but I just found this, which might interest you. Helmut is one of the senior administrators on the XnView forum, apparently 2nd only to Pierre, the XnView author.

Personally I use B and C: XnView for managing images and Corel PhotoPaint and MS Paint for manipulating them.

[anonymez]

I can use Paint to remove speckles, resize sections of an image, move & crop sections, and then reassemble the image to the proportions I want. I can sample colors & then use them to fill or blend away blemishes, and copy randomly-shaped areas to edit the image

you must be very patient to do all that with paint! xnview isn't a full fleged editor, experiment with it a bit to see what it is capable of. as for editing, try GIMP. freeware as well.

[Steve83]

GIMP looks really complex, and installing it was a PITA, too. It'll probably take me some time to figure it out, and what more I might be able to do with xnv. But I'm pretty quick with Paint.

[gonwk]

I use WinDVD4.0 "Capture" feature ... play the DVD or your Video folder off of your hard drive and click away however many images you want to capture ...

BUT the new Version of WinDVD (e.g. 5.0, ...) does not have this great feature.

G!