First, thank you all - members, moderators, financer(s) and operator(s), for this site. As you can tell from my language I am not experienced at technical aspects of video or computers. I researched this site for half an hour - vocabulary, forum and guides, using the terms I am familiar with such as 'stills', 'jpegs' etc and nothing came up. So, if this question has been answered elsewhere in this section, I apologize, and ask to be directed there. I am familiar with imovie. I watch many DVDs and wish to be able to capture decent quality jpegs from what I view. To begin, I am happy to report that I learned from another site that there is a built-in screen capture function: Command [that funny symbol with the apple] + shift + 3. Press all three at once and I get an image on my desktop. Problem is the quality. I tested it on a website page. Text looks horrible. I used to get my jpegs images (useful for photoshop or similar software ways of adjusting) by meticulously going through the following steps... 1. Run DVD from DVD player machine to camcorder. 2. Run mini-DV tape to imovie in computer 3. Use pause function and take stills in imovie. 4. Use stills as desired. But that requires three pieces of equipment and a lot of time. I am on the road now and would like to be able to do it quicker and easier - perhaps using some freeware that is a no-brainer. Anyone have experience doing this?
I forgot to mention... I have a G4, and Toast is installed. Super features is not as important as reliability and simplicity of use.
I was wrong. Although the screen capture function while on the web with Safari, it will not work when using the default DVD player. I get a message: "Screen grabs are not available during DVD playback first."
Do a search for DVD capture, that's a JPG grabber from DVD's and it's free, I think, well there's a working S-Box code for it anyway.
Download VLC (www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html) and use it to play the movie, rather than the Mac OS's DVD Player.app This GNU public license FREE app will play DVDs of any format (and from any REGION code). Using the space bar to pause and unpause, cause the computer to display the frame you want to capture. Use cmd-shift-3 or cmd-shift-4 as you like to make the capture. This will place a file "Picture 1.png" on your desktop. Open this file, and export it as a .jpg (since that is what you said you wanted to do). Many would leave it in .png format, saving a step.
http://www.chimoosoft.com/ Download Capture Me (free). This works the same as Grab, but will work with DVDPlayer. Play on DVDPlayer or Quicktime, pause at the image you want, and position the frame over the part of the image you want and click. This might actually be a tiff image, so you may have to convert the tiff to jpeg with another piece of software. terryxpress
