What program can I use to take a perfect still from a movie?

[Cougar]

I was messing with PowerDVD the other day and I discovered that it can capture a scene to a .bmp file and while that is cool the picture is no where near DVD quality. In fact, when I play the DVD on my PC it doesn't look anywhere near as good as it does when it's playing in my Toshiba DVD player. I have tried hardware dvd decoders and various DVD software in the past and the movie never looks as good on the PC as it does on the TV.

So I was wondering if anyone knows of a program that can take a perfect picture of certain scenes. What I'm basically trying to do is capture a frame and use it as my background. Does anyone know if such an app exists?

 

[igowerf]

What do you mean that the picture looks bad? Is it blurry? Each frame might have a little motion blur in it so there's really nothing you can do about that.

 

[Cougar]

Hmmm, it is a little blurry but like you said there's probably some motion blur that is causing it. What I mean by a bad picture is that while it's playing it's just not as clear as it is when it's playing on my TV. The picture is too "grainy". I don't really know how else to explain it. I don't think it's my computer itself since I've upgraded pretty much every component. So any clue what else it could be?

 

[MrChad]

DVD resolution is 720x480 (interlaced). On a low resolution display such as a television, DVDs look great. On high resolution monitors, the quality appears to be worse because the picture is scaled to the width of the monitor (say 1024 pixels) and picture flaws are blown up. This might explain why the picture seems "more grainy" to you on a monitor.

 

[Cougar]

Originally posted by: MrChad
DVD resolution is 720x480 (interlaced). On a low resolution display such as a television, DVDs look great. On high resolution monitors, the quality appears to be worse because the picture is scaled to the width of the monitor (say 1024 pixels) and picture flaws are blown up. This might explain why the picture seems "more grainy" to you on a monitor.

Really? I didn't know that. So does that mean that there's no way to get a "clear" picture from a dvd? I just picked up the new Star Trek movie and I was hoping to use some scenes as my wallpaper.

 

[dakels]

Originally posted by: Cougar

Originally posted by: MrChad
DVD resolution is 720x480 (interlaced). On a low resolution display such as a television, DVDs look great. On high resolution monitors, the quality appears to be worse because the picture is scaled to the width of the monitor (say 1024 pixels) and picture flaws are blown up. This might explain why the picture seems "more grainy" to you on a monitor.

Really? I didn't know that. So does that mean that there's no way to get a "clear" picture from a dvd? I just picked up the new Star Trek movie and I was hoping to use some scenes as my wallpaper.

Like MrChad said, the resolution is made to fit certain formats like standard TV (320x240), HD 480 (720x480) and HD 1080 (1920x1080).
If you had DVD in HD 1080i, that resolution is as good as the max settings on most monitors so you should be able to display it well. But you also have to realize that the 16:9 DVD/HD aspect ratio is different then the 4:3 that computer monitors and non widescreen TV's use. So that means you'll either have to cut the image off on the sides or expand the image vertically, which will distort your image.

Another thing to realize is the TV images, filmed video is blurry. You just dont see most of the blur because it is moving by at 25 or 29.97 frames per second. But when you stop that motion to a single frame, you will most likely see the blurs/flaws in an image. The best way to get a DVD/video capture is to find a spot where the video's motion is at a minimum. Like maybe a a scene that shows very few people/objects in motion. Thats about the best way to find a nice clear image to capture. And if you want something for a desktop wallpaper, you really should have a DVD in HD 1080 quality, but I dont think many if any commercial DVD movies are 1080 yet, IIRC. It requires an enourmous amount of data.

It's also good to have an editing program too so you can see individual frames. I am pretty sure something like a player like PowerDVD won't let you progress frame by frame, maybe second by second but not frames.

 

[MrChad]

And if you want something for a desktop wallpaper, you really should have a DVD in HD 1080 quality, but I dont think many if any commercial DVD movies are 1080 yet, IIRC. It requires an enourmous amount of data.

All DVDs must be encoded as 720x480i in order to conform to the DVD specification. There are no "HD quality" DVDs because 1080i is not a supported resolution of the format. The new T2 Extreme DVD features a special Windows media file that uses Microsoft's HD codec, but this is separate from the actual DVD movie.

It should be noted that many DVD players can output 720x480p ("progressive scan"). This is achieved by special de-interlacer chips that upconvert the 480i signal to 480p.