Auto screencapping with VLC in Mac OS X

[pibby]

This might be somewhat translatable for Windows users, but I can't say for sure since I don't own any PCs. If you will be making a lot of caps in VLC of a show or movie, you might want an alternative to pressing the hotkeys for VLC's Snapshot function over and over again. Hopefully, this will help you out!

Checklist

• Mac OS X (I have no idea if the Windows version of VLC has the same settings, perhaps someone could check and let me know)
• VLC (version 0.8.6)

Setting Your Preferences

1. Open VLC
2. Open the Preferences pane (Cmd + ,) [ Show Me ]
3. Click the checkbox next to "Advanced" in the bottom left of the window
4. Click the arrow next to the word "Video" on the left to display the rest of the video preferences
5. On the left, below "Video," click "Output Modules"
6. On the right, choose "Image Video Output" from the dropdown list [ Show Me ]
7. On the left, click the arrow next to "Output Modules" to display more options
8. On the left, click "Image file"
9. On the right, set the settings for your capped images (Image format, Recording ratio, etc.).
   - Image format - PNG or JPEG
   - Image width and height - You may want to change this from the default (-1, -1). Sometimes, VLC doesn't seem to get the dimensions correct when doing the caps. The issue was brought up on the VLC forum here, but there was never a response. If you already know the dimensions of your video, I suggest you go ahead and enter them.
   - Recording ratio - ratio of images to record (the default is 3, so 1 out of 3 images is saved). The lower the ratio, the more often caps will be saved. I believe this has to do with the frames- if you set the ratio to 30, 1 cap will be taken every 30 frames.
   - Filename prefix - you can change this if you want, the default is "img"
   [ Show Me ]
10. Once you're satisfied with your settings, click the "Save" button at the bottom right of your Preferences Pane

Let's Cap!

1. Open the file (or DVD) in VLC that you wish to cap.
2. Press the Play button if the file does not start automatically.
3. You will not see the video playing now that we've changed our preferences above. VLC is now outputing the video into images instead. [ Show Me ]
4. Let your video play and keep capping as long as you'd like. You can even use the slider to skip ahead or return to certain parts of your video. Put more than one video in your playlist and let it run all night if you want. If you need to stop it at anytime, press the "Stop" button. [ Show Me ]

Let's take a look at the caps

• Your caps are located in your main harddrive directory. Unless you have named your harddrive, you should recognize "Macintosh HD." When you open Finder, it should be listed on the left, usually toward the top of the list. [ Show Me ]
• Depending on the ratio you set in your preferences and the length of your video, you probably now have thousands of caps located in your "Macintosh HD" folder.
• Take a look at your caps in whatever image viewer you prefer (Preview, Xee, Photoshop, iPhoto, etc) [ Show Me ]

What I do

• I don't like the caps sitting in my "Macintosh HD" folder!
• I fire up iPhoto, create a new album for the episode or movie that I'm capping, and drag the caps to the new album for iPhoto to import. Once they are imported into iPhoto, I delete them from original folder since I don't need the images in 2 places- plus, I will be deleting the caps that turned out poorly. [ Show Me ]
• I then go through each cap and delete the ones that are "bad" (who wants to see eyes closed, awkward mid-word faces, or blurry caps). This can take a very long time if there are a lot of images.
• If I'm going to be sharing the caps, I like to make a new folder on my Desktop and drag the images from my album in iPhoto to the new folder. This folder will eventually be deleted once I've created a zip file of it or uploaded all of the pictures somewhere (again, I've got them all stored in iPhoto, so I don't want to clutter my computer with the same files in different locations).

Changing the Preferences back to "normal" video viewing

1. Open your VLC preferences
2. Click the arrow next to "Video" to expand it
3. On the left, below "Video," click "Output Modules"
4. On the right, choose "Default" from the dropdown list [ Show Me ]
5. Click "Save" at the bottom right of your preferences pane

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.