Help for a newbie re screenshots.

[fruitbat00]

Hi there I hope I am doing this right. I have had a quick troll through the forum but I couldnt see the answer to this. Please forgive me if I have missed a topic dealing with this. I wish to make screenshots from a video. I.E. set it up to automatically take a set of screen caps from the video. Not just single shots. I have searched the web and there are loads of info on how to do this in VLC for windows. But none on how to do it for the Mac version. Is there an option for this on the Mac version that I cannot find?

I am new to the player and Mac so if this is a stupid question or it has been answered on here already please excuse me. I have the latest version of the player and Mac OS X 10.6.8. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[crackstone]

I wish to make screenshots from a video. I.E. set it up to automatically take a set of screen caps from the video. Not just single shots.

if i understand this correctly you want to continuously take snapshots of a video? and not do it manually? is that what you mean?
anyways, try running the following command from within terminal. it produces a series of snapshots from the video. in this case every 120th frame.

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/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I dummy --video-filter=scene --vout=dummy --no-audio --scene-format=png --scene-ratio=120 --scene-prefix=videoSnap --scene-path=/Users/username /Users/username/Movies/theNameOfYourVideo.mp4 vlc://quit &>/dev/null & echo $!

replace paths and input with your source (movie, stream, whatever it may be)
adjust --scene-ratio to your need (in this case it takes snapshots every 120th frame)

if you still need more info on this enter this into your terminal

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/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -H | less

and search for scene. there's a scene video filter which allows you to send your video to picture files. that info should help you tweak your command to your needs.

//crackstone

[fruitbat00]

Hi therer thanks for the info.

And yes I want to take continuous snapshots automatically

Being a mac newbie I just want to clarify I just open terminal and paste the code in replacing the movie name with the one I want. Is that correct?

[crackstone]

Being a mac newbie I just want to clarify I just open terminal and paste the code in replacing the movie name with the one I want. Is that correct?

Yes.

If you're a true newbie to mac and its terminal, the following should be noted:
Give the full path to your movie name.
Also replace the --scene-path=/Users/username with the directory where you want the snapshots to be saved to e.g.: /Users/yourname/Pictures
Your VLC application needs to be in the standard /Applications folder for Mac; for this command to work.
If it doesn't work be sure that you don't have any spaces in your movie name, or escape them correctly --> to see an example just cmd+c your movie, open the terminal and hit cmd+v it will automatically post the full path to your video.

That should be it.

//crackstone

[fruitbat00]

Thank you so much I will let you know how I get on

[fruitbat00]

Cool i got it to cap a small video. Thanks again for the help as I have never really used terminal.

Re the /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -H | less command is there a way to export the entire thing to a text file so that I can look at it all including the scene info.

[crackstone]

no problem. glad i could help

to export the help info to a text file issue the following command in terminal

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/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -H > vlcHelp.txt

however it's easier to just use help in terminal with less and search through it by entering /searchpattern or ?searchpattern
if you've never used the terminal try learning a bit about it e.g. here http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/02/uni ... avigation/
just google the hell out of 'mac, unix, terminal, usage' or whatever and you'll pretty much get the hang of it

happy reading

//crackstone

[fruitbat00]

Thanks for the link and the info re the text file. I saved the file and at the moment it all looks complicated but I am sure once I get the hang of what is what re commands and stuff, it will all make sense. The link you sent me looks to explain stuff nice and simply for a beginner like me.

I have one question I went in and tried to cap the movie, just decided to let it run and cap the whole thing while I did other stuff as I need the caps for an art project this weekend. And it stops taking caps just about 5 minutes into the film. I cut the scene ratio down to 1 to make sure I get the shots I want. Is there a limit to how many it can take. or how long it will record as the scene I want is 55 minutes into the movie.

[crackstone]

first try to run the command without the quit and the dev/null stuff but with the verbose output flag set to -vvv like this:

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -vvv -I dummy --video-filter=scene --vout=dummy --no-audio --scene-format=png --scene-ratio=120 --scene-prefix=videoSnap --scene-path=/Users/username /Users/username/Movies/theNameOfYourVideo.mp4

you should get plenty of output. Look at what it says when it stops making the caps after 5 minutes.

If you just want caps around the 55 minutes area you could also use --start-time and --stop-time. The options take seconds as input so 55 would be 3300 seconds

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -vvv -I dummy --start-time=3200 --stop-time=3400 --video-filter=scene --vout=dummy --no-audio --scene-format=png --scene-ratio=120 --scene-prefix=videoSnap --scene-path=/Users/username /Users/username/Movies/theNameOfYourVideo.mp4

see if that helps/works. oh and i guess setting the ratio to 1 will pretty much spam you with snapshots cause i guess he'll snap every frame. but i'm not sure - use trial and error.

i don't know what your ultimate goal is but from what i read so far wouldn't it be easier for you to just use the manual way of grabbing snapshots via Video-->Snapshot or ALT+CMD+S
maybe you could elaborate on what you actually want to achieve in the end. just some specific snapshots from some specific time frame/range; only two or three selected shots; the whole movie?

//crackstone

[fruitbat00]

Thanks again you have been an absolute star.

Yep taking it down to 1 does kind of spam me with caps but I tried the manual way and the program kept freezing up when I tried to take to many shots.

This worked perfectly.

Reading the options was a bit confusing but your examples have given me a better understanding of the way they work. So hopefully I can build and adapt from there.

Thank you again for all the help.

[senior]

When searching for a solution to the same task on an Windows 10 PC I ran over this post. Is there a similar possibility for Windows? The purpose ist to to make screenshots every, say 5 minutes of a longer video (mostly movie).