full-screen video frame grabbing

[carol]

I'd like to take full screen frame grabs from movie files (mpg, wmf, avi). I began to do this by opening the files in RealPlayer, pausing, hitting PrtScr, pasting from the desktop into PhotoPaint and then saving. No problem. PC shut down. The next time I tried it the desktop image was blank. I switched to Windows Media Player, where it again worked. I closed down but again, the next time I tried I got a blank desktop image. Now I can't get frame images using either player.

Two questions ~

1, why was the frame image sometimes visible, sometimes not and why doesn't it work at all now?

2, is there any freeware that takes frame grabs from movie files and saves them to a file so I don't have to keep stopping to save the image in PhotoPaint?

[liljim]

What operating system do you have?

The only freeware i can think of off hand would be windows movie maker,included in winme and xp.There is a windows movie maker 2 avaliable for xp that should also work.

here's a link to movie maker 2 and a tutorial on freeze frames

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/movi ... eframe.asp

[carol]

Sorry, I thought I'd put all my PC specs in my profile. Oh well. I'm using XP. I'll take a look at Movie Maker. Thanks for the link, I'll gen up over the weekend.