The VideoLAN Forums

From a bit of testing, I've come to realize that jpeg snapshots saved by VLC are of poorer quality than png snapshots converted to jpeg (for example, via Microsoft Paint or IrfanView).

To illustrate my point here are some snapshots (enlarged for clarity):
This is a PNG snapshot (size 594 KB)

This is PNG snapshot converted to JPEG (size 78 KB)

This is a JPEG snapshot (size 67 KB)


As can be seen, the PNG snapshot is nearly identical to the PNG screenshot converted to JPEG. But the JPEG snapshot, while similar in size to the PNG-to-JPEG one, is of much poorer quality. I can therefore save disk space by converting every PNG snapshot to JPEG after I take them, but it is a tedious process. Instead, if the player had a "choose quality" option when the user chooses to save snapshots as JPEG, it would make getting high-quality, small size screen captures much easier.

To summarize: can we get the option to increase the quality JPEG snapshots?
(Or is this already possible through some configuration files?)

What version did you try?

I have 2.1.0 "Rincewind".

Ah, it seems 2.2 is out. I've checked its changelog, and I suppose it addresses this issue:

Encoders:
New jpeg image encoder using libjpeg

I'll upgrade and see if it gets better.

edit: Yes, it indeed seems to have improved. Now the difference between png and jpeg screenshots are hardly visible. And the size of jpeg snapshots are even slightly higher than the size of png snapshots converted into jpeg.

Thank you for the heads up.

You're welcome.