Hi,

I'm not sure under which category this posting should go but I guess it's 'best' described as a desktop issue...

While taking screen shots when using software like mplayer or xine the video window is totally blue within the screenshot image.

I never had this issue on my other 'newer' machine which had an Intel GM45HD chipset.

The current chipset of this much less powered box is an Intel i855.

I have a feeling that it's something to do with the video overlay or perhaps the graphics drivers.


Has anyone got any advice on what it is or a solution to the problem without pressing the 'screen capture' hotkey from the video players as I'm trying to get the whole desktop in the shot?


Thanks.

What distribution are you using? I remember back in the day when I did this similar thing, I had to disable hardware acceleration in order to get it to work.

Thanks for the response

I'm using something called Salix which is based on Slackware.

I did a bit of reading in the meantime about disabling the h/w acceleration and took a look at glxinfo, indeed Xorg is using the Intel driver for the i855 which I believe to be the i810.

I don't have any Xorg.conf in /etc/X11 though as I wanted to # out the glx portion.

Guess I'll have to run Xorg --configure, which will then create the file then comment out the above?


I remember having this issue waaaay back when too with Debian 3.01R but I think after I swapped over to Kubuntu 9.04 on that box it went away - that box is now sitting in the store room as it's too old to be used any more for normal stuff.

Erm..... I still think it's an XV video overlay issue but I could be wrong. Trying mplayer with the various drivers didn't work however.

If X is doing a full screen buffer, mplayer is bypassing that via acceleration, anyway. Even where X is not and has to do an expose operation to all the X apps, mplayer doesn't respond to that because normally it will be sending the next frame "real soon now" anyway.

Try setting up a virtual instance of X via VNC (do not use the Xvnc code that lets you access a real X instance via VNC). Connect to the virtual instance with a VNC client. Now capture the VNC client window.

Depending on what you are doing, mplayer/ffmpeg does have the ability to use a "driver" that just spews out each video frame into an image file in a specified directory. Then pick the one you want.

I get what your saying.

One would need two machines for this though or connect to same machine?

VNC is going to be hard for me to run I think as just running a few terminals already takes up round 60MB swap and if I open a browser or so I am in 300MB+ of swap space... :-(

You're taking screen shots with the desktop, using PrtScr; use the control in the video player instead (Ctrl T in gnome-mplayer) and that will work.

Yep indeed this will work :-)

The only problem with this method is that you can't get the whole desktop in the screen-capture just the video portion, meaning to add it in later one will need to do a GIMP job on it.

My reasons for wanting the 'whole' desktop is to iterate things on the screen not just grab the video as the dimensions are left at 320x240 or 480x320 of the video file itself.

As example:

Attached Thumbnails

 

Try the VNC approach within just one machine. You'll have 2 X servers running, one "inside" using a virtual buffer and where the mplayer window is, and one "on the video card" (the usual case of X Windows) running just VNC in full screen mode (to get the same size). Then try various capture approaches. If "PrintScrn" is going to work, it would have to get the whole full screen window of the VNC client since the X Server driving the video card doesn't really know about the smaller windows you see (they are on the inside X server that is driving a VNC server).

<blergh, never mind, didn't read >

I was going to suggest to the OP that he try the basic x11 driver with mplayer, but he already stated that he's already used "various drivers"…

Mplayer has a screenshot feature, use that to get screenshots, external apps won't work.

I'll give this a try but am already in swap space with a few terminals open so the system may just not take the extra load.

What was it... C on Mplayer and T on Xine..


Btw have a look at this:

http://www.optiplex-networks.com/xwi...Nimbus?diapo=6

I captured that on KUbuntu 9.04 - don't worry about the Solaris theme; I was 'theming' at the time for the Belenix OS in which I used my hard-install of Ubuntu as the test template! - hence the little telltale Bluethooth support icon which Solaris I don't think had bluetooth support back then.


Besides the point the above link is what I'm aiming at doing with my old hardware as that particular notebook stopped working so am down to an ancient Centrino Mobile M 1.7GHz uni-core CPU with 484MB RAM and intel 855 chipset... you know the one with the memory leak issue