aaa VLC help?

[zaluzianskya]

This is probably super pathetic of me, but two hours of Googling isn't doing any good.

I'm trying to use VLC to take automatic screenshots of videos. Sounds simple, right? There used to be a nice, simple image output option you could select under Video > Output modules. Now it's not there. All the Googling I've done has told me that image output has been replaced with something called scene filter, and there's a scene filter thing underneath output modules that lets me tweak how I'd like the output to be done, but there's no way for me to actually select scene filter in output modules.

(I tried print screening to make this less incoherent, but it seems I can't do that while I have a drop-down menu open. Sorry.)

Is there any way I can do this? I'm not opposed to using the command line if that's what it takes.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

I can't remember, but then I tended to use xine to take screenshots.

[tonybaldwin]

Yeah. I would use gxine, myself.

[zaluzianskya]

Like I said in the above comment (copying here so you'll get the notification too): I downloaded gxine to see what it was like, and I can't find an option to take automatic screenshots every x seconds; there's a snapshot option, but it just takes one cap. How does it work?

[tonybaldwin]

Oh, Missed that you were looking to take repeated, automatic shots.
I wonder if ffmpeg or mplayer can somehow export screenshots from a video in that manner with a script.
But, no, I don't think gxine will do that.

[zaluzianskya]

I downloaded gxine to see what it was like, and I can't find an option to take automatic screenshots every x seconds; there's a snapshot option, but it just takes one cap. How does it work?

[kerravonsen]

No, it's the snapshot option I was referring to.

[zaluzianskya]

Darn. I was hoping I'd finally found something other than VLC that could do that automatically... Thanks, though.

[jorlau]

If you just want to be able to take a screenshot every n seconds while you're watching the video, you could try just making a bash script using scrot or a similar tool, for example:

while ps -ewf | grep v[l]c; do #as long as VLC is running
scrot -[OPTIONS] #take the screenshot
sleep n #wait n seconds
done