So you watched a movie and are so much thrilled by it that you want to tell the whole world about it. Well there are so many ways to let your feelings out – write about it on IMDB and perhaps you can even start your own blog about all the movies that you have watched and how you felt about them. When writing about movies, you may have to add snapshots of movies or trailer videos in your reviews. Fortunately, it is very easy to take the snapshots of videos/movies in Windows.
1. Take snapshots in Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player comes pre-installed in Windows (at-least in the non-European editions). So when you insert a movie DVD/Bluray, perhaps it will be played in the Windows Media Player. This media player program does not offer any in-built method to take the snapshots. But you can always pause the video and then press the PrintScreen key on your keyboard to copy the visible contents of your screen to the clipboard. After this you can paste it in any image editor and crop the snapshot.
2. Take snapshots using VideoLAN VLC Media Player
This is the most popular media player for all the platforms – Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS and more. The main reason why millions of people love this program is that it does not require any codecs to be installed for playing media files and still can manage to play a huge number of media file formats. In order to take snapshots in VLC media player, you can select Tools → Take Snapshot from the menubar. The snapshot is saved in form of a PNG image in the user profile “Pictures” folder. The settings where the snapshot is saved can be changed from VLC options.
3. Take snapshots using Media Player Classic
When Windows Media Player lost its original looks decades ago and became bloated, some open-source developers create Media Player Classic in the memory of the original Windows Media Player. This application uses minimal resources in works even in the latest build of Windows 10. You can select File → Save Image to save the image of the current frame to any folder in the JPEG format. Similarly, you can select File → Save Thumbnails to create an image containing frames from the movie.
Conclusion: There are many programs and ways to capture the snapshots from a movie or video in Windows. Simplest of them are through the use of VLC Media Player and Media Player Classic.