Screenshotting E3

This morning we are going to take a brief break from my daily recap posts in part because I was not home last night, nor have I watched the last of the shows put on by Nintendo. I know a handful of the titles that were announced, and I also know that I am a sad panda because nothing was said about Metroid Prime 4. Until I have time to digest what was announced and more importantly capture screenshots from it… we are going to have to delay the final post in that series. However the topic of screenshots has come up a few times in regards to my posts so it inspired today’s more informational post.

Every screenshot that you have seen to date from the E3 coverage posts for better or worse is something I have captured myself. There was at time when I would attempt to rely on shots being spread around as part of press kits. The problem there however is that they were often times all completely different sizes which made my eye twitch. Instead I went down a path of madness to try and figure out how to easily capture video stills without loading all of the videos into an editor like premiere.

The result of this search lead me to a tool I was already using… VLC or VideoLAN Client which like a good number of open source projects is a fairly utilitarian name for what it is. Ultimately its beginning roots are that of a simple video player that has morphed into a Swiss army knife of video related tools. Need to apply subtitles to a video and render the final product out as a flattened MKV file… VLC can do that. Need to resize video or swap between formats… VLC can do that too. However for our purposes we are going to focus on the fact that VLC can play network streams and allow you to capture easy screenshots.

First off you are going to need a copy of the software and for that you can head over to VideoLAN.org. There are official releases for Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, a ton of Linux distributions and a slew of other random platforms. Hell you can get a version of VLC that runs happily on OS/2… which if you are using OS/2 still you maybe have more problems than taking screenshots of E3 presentations. Regardless grab your copy, install it… and we are wanting specifically to talk about the “Open Network Stream” functionality that can be accessed with Ctrl+N in windows platforms.

From there you are going to enter some manner of network stream bit it a YouTube URL as shown above. Of note it seems to respect the various arguments that you can pass into the end of a YouTube URL so you can start your replay at a specific time or fiddle with the resolution. So if you tag on a “vq=hd1080” for example you get a 1080p stream being captured. Now the really fun thing about this is that it works with various streaming services like Twitch and as such I live captured screenshots while watching the Bethesda event the other night. Something of additional note is that I have found there are some streams that just will not work and or crash VLC… so you may have to shop around for some unofficial locations for trailers if you are doing this after the fact. The Xbox Channel for example seems to be doing something that VLC does not like, and maybe it is the disable embedding flag that you can do through YouTube or something like that.

VLC defaults to using the shortcut of Shift+S for taking a Video Snapshot as they call it. I have ultimately been too lazy to change this to anything else in part because I couldn’t think of a better combination for my purposes. The end result is that I find myself watching streams with the shift key held down permanently and then I tap S anytime I want to take a shot. The default path for saving them is going to be in the Windows User profile Pictures directory. I have modified this and you can do this while you are in the preferences menu as well under the video tab by changing the Video Snapshots directory. You can also change the prefix and the format it will save in. Now you should be ready to easily pull stills from video feeds.

While on the topic of VLC player there is one other somewhat hidden feature that I use the hell out of. We have a number of Chromecasts spread throughout the house and you can use VLC to broadcast a stream to I believe pretty much any of the stream capable devices. These devices only show up in my case when the television is turned on as I am using the USB ports on device to power the chromecasts. However this morning my wife is still in the bedroom and the television is tuned to the news, and as such the Bedroom TV shows up as a possible target under “Renderer”. With this you can use VLC to cast pretty much any media file to a target device giving me one more reason to love this tool.

Tonight I hope to make my way through the Nintendo presentation and tomorrow to write my thoughts about it. I will also likely wrap up anything else that has come out in the pre-E3 buzz and give some of my general thoughts about this year as a whole. In the meantime however I hope this helps you out.