In Windows XP, taking a screenshot is usually as easy as hitting the “Print Screen” key. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for movie files. When you try to take a screenshot of a movie in XP, you just get a black box where the still image is supposed to be.

I use VLC as my general movie player – it’s a great freeware, open-source player that will play most anything you throw at it. It also allows you to take still-image snapshots of movies.

To take a screenshot of a movie, follow these steps:

  1. Download VLC from here. (It’s open source & free)
  2. Install, play your movie until you get to the image you want to capture. Pause the movie.
  3. In VLC, go to Video->Snapshot
  4. The snapshot will be saved to your “My Pictures” directory.

Voila- Video still frame captured!

By default, VLC will save the snapshot as a PNG file. So if you’re looking to post it to the web somewhere, you probably want to convert it to JPG format first.

The forum topic that inspired this post.