Need a prog that takes random screenshots from a movie

Why would anyone want such a program? just take 'em by hand so you don't end up with a cap of, say, a door.

You can try my program, SnatchIt! It'll automatically take as many snapshots as you want from most any video file. Check my sig.

Hi OdieGiblet,

I tried 3 proggies in the recent days:

1. VideoCharge - its not bad but this little bit confuses me:

"Warning: You can activate one bought copy of VideoCharge only 3 times!"

2. SnagIt - looks not that bad, but I could not capture multiple screenshots from video AVI file.
What type of input should i choose in order for it to take captures from video

3. SnatchIt

Your program so far satisfied my needs but I still dont get how this SKIP AMOUNT thingy works. Does it actually relate to CAPTURE or just for PREVIEWing purposes?

Also in my case when i have HUGE AVI (720x480) file it looks like it can not process it properly and makes a lot of duplicates...or did i do something wrong in settings

jawanda,

You are probably right about it as well, but usually its some hassle with tossing DVD player from one room to another, playing with cables and stuff...

But you may always decrease interval between captures to get more of them to choose from

There is another way yet to do it with PowerDVD's Capture Frame feature but in most cases its very hard to get specific frame you need

I need to write a bit of a help file, but basically the skip amount changes how much the video is going to seek when you hit the skip buttons at the bottom. So if you want to skip only one frame each time you hit the buttons or the right and left arrows, then move the Skip Amount bar all the way to the left. If you want to skip in bigger jumps, move it to the right. (The up and down arrows control this value also so it's easy to mess around with and find some good settings.)

What interval were you using exactly? I need to add some functionality that takes frame rate into account. The problem you're experiencing might be that SnatchIt! is seeking 30ms but there's only a new frame in your video every 62ms so some times you're going to get duplicate frames.
If this is not the case, and the issue you're describing of having a lot of duplicates can some times be cause by bad codecs installed on your system. The Nimo Codec Pack for instance installs a DivX 5.0.2 filter which completely ruins the functionality in SnatchIt! and the actual DivX files must be installed.

Let me know what's going on, I'm striving to make this program work perfectly on all systems and all video files. And let me know if there's any feature you'd like to have added.

because I need 5 screencaps of approx 100 movies and don't want to waste time to make 500 caps by hand

Codecs are fine.

I think its because HUGE FILE SIZE of that AVI.
its raw file i got from encoding DVD 2 AVI

After re-encoding it into MPEG even with high quality settings it worked fine

You proggy is Ok
Its simple and its working

TMPGEnc Plus. Will allow a full movie to be rendered into pics.

hey OdieGiblet,

still having some problems with SnatchIt...it creates duplicates...

its every third of the movie is same image

what can i do?
what codecs you may suggest that will work with SnatchIt?

TIA

You can do the whole thing from the command line using Image Magick

Hey Mistress,
What type of AVI is it? DivX? XviD? or other? And what settings are you using? If you're doing it by milliseconds, how many are you skipping? Same with thumb count?
You can also try the latest beta version which now has batch mode implemented. I've made a few changes to the auto-thumbs which just might resolve your issue. But it is beta and not fully completed yet, it works fine, but still needs a few tweaks.
http://theedgeofforever.com/snatchitbeta.zip

Hey OdieGiblet,

format: AVI
codec: DivX
screen: 720x480
interval: 1000 ms - 310 thumbs, 500 ms - 520 thumbs


I found SnagIT very effective... It works but with one weakness - interval can not be set less than 1 sec...