Thread: Grabbing video

Taking screengrabs that involve video - for example, a software DVD player or video-editing application can sometimes be a problem. Where the video frame should be displayed, all you'll see is a black or green box. This happens because of the way video applications write to the display to improve performance. They use a dedicated screen buffer in video hardware to render the video frames, which are then overlayed on the display using chromakey. PrtScr and screengrab utilities can't read the hardware overlay, so all you see is the chromakey rectangle that indicates the position of the video.



However, there's an easy way around this - turn off the hardware overlay to make your screengrab, then turn it back on when you're done. In Vista, right-click the desktop, select Personalize and click Display Settings. Click on the Advanced Settings button, and then select the Troubleshoot tab, followed by the Change settings button. Next, drag the Hardware acceleration slider all the way to the left towards None. The process is almost exactly the same in Windows XP.