News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Sunday, October 21, 2012

How I take BD screen captures

10:11 PM / Blu-ray / 18 Comments

I quite often get emails and comments asking how to take screen captures of Blu-ray Discs. Given the frequency of these requests, I thought it would be a good idea to make a quick guide on the subject in order to avoid repeating myself.

The method I'm going to provide here is, in my experience, the easiest to follow and the one that is least likely to introduce inaccuracies. If you follow these instructions you should be able to produce captures that are an accurate representation of what is on the disc. Please note that you will only be able to use this method for titles encoded with AVC. These days, that's pretty much 99% of all titles on the market. You'll need to use different methods for discs that use either VC-1 or MPEG-2, but that's a guide for another day.

What you'll need:

1. A BD-ROM drive
2. DGAVCDec
3. A means to decrypt Blu-ray Discs

For point 3, you have a few options. The only one I know anything about is SlySoft's AnyDVD HD, which unfortunately comes with a fairly significant price tag attached. I bought mine some years back when a lifetime subscription was considerably cheaper than it is now. If you're going to be taking a lot of captures and/or intend to turn your PC into a multi-region home theatre setup, I'd still consider it a price worth paying, but I can understand people not wanting to part with €119. Luckily there's a 21-day trial version available, so you can at least sample the product and decide whether you feel it's a worthwhile investment.

OK, so you've got your BD-ROM drive, DGAVCDec and your decryption method. For the purposes of expediency and because it's the only method of which I have any experience, I'm going to assume you're using AnyDVD HD. Before you begin, extract the contents of the DGAVCDec .zip file you downloaded to a location somewhere on your hard drive (e.g. C:\DGAVCDec). Make sure AnyDVD HD is running, then pop your Blu-ray Disc of choice into your BD-ROM drive.

After a few seconds, this should appear:

Followed shortly by this:

Select the correct region code and press OK.

Once AnyDVD HD has worked its magic, you'll either see nothing, an autoplay screen or the BD will begin playing in your installed BD playback software, depending on your system configuration. Either way, what you now want to do is go to whichever location you extracted the DGAVCDec .zip file to, and run DGAVCIndex.exe. This is what you should see:

Before we open up our BD and begin capturing, click the "Video" tab, point to "YUV -> RGB" and make sure "PC scale" is selected. This will make sure the PC's full RGB dynamic range of 0-255 is used rather than the limited 16-235 of video (which would make your captures look grey and washed out):

That's the only bit of video setup you need to do. As I noted in a previous post, the nice thing about DGAVCIndex is that it doesn't use your graphics card's video decoding capabilities, so you can be sure it isn't adding anything funky like edge enhancement or grain reduction.

Now that that's taken care of, go to "File" and choose "Open" (or hit "F2"). You'll be taken to the standard Windows explorer view. Your task now is to point to the BD in your drive, open the "BDMV" folder and the "Stream" within it, and select the .m2ts file that contains the movie itself. Unless it's one of those annoying discs that string multiple small files together using seamless branching, it's almost guaranteed to be the largest file in the folder, so it will probably help to sort the files by size, like this:

Once you've found the file, select it and click "Open". You'll then see this screen:

Click "OK". In a couple of seconds you'll see this view:

You can now start cycling through the still frames of the movie, either by dragging the slider at the bottom of the frame or using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to step through the individual I-frames. It's quite slow and a bit fiddly, but it does what it says on the tin. You can play the movie by pressing F6, and depending on your computer's power it should be able to play at something approaching full speed. To pause and unpause, use SPACEBAR. (This will allow you to select inter-frames instead of just I-frames. If you don't know what any of this means, it's probably best not to worry about it.)

Once you've found a frame you want to capture, hit F8 to copy it to the clipboard. Then, paste it into your image editing programme of choice (e.g. Photoshop). Note that by default, DGAVCIndex shows frames at half size, and unless you have an insanely high desktop resolution, that's probably the only way you can comfortably fit it on the screen. To change to full size, click "Video" and choose "Display HD Full Sized". Don't worry, though - regardless of how you display it, it will still capture at full resolution when you hit F8.

Now comes the easy part: simply save your capture as your preferred file type. If using a lossy format like .jpg, be sure to use the least compression possible. (A compression level of 12 in Photoshop produces images that are, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from lossless images by the human eye.)

Et voilà! Now you too are a true screenshot scientist:

Disclaimer: staring at screen captures is no substitute for watching the disc in motion, yadda yadda yadda.

18 Comments

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.