New Features/Improvements to BS.Player

[Bikonja]

I suggest a developers feature that is similar to an already (twice) requested feature - the one to automatically take screenshots at a specified interval.
What I'm suggesting is that BSPlayer should provide a way for other apps to request a screenshot of the video currently playing, as (due to hardware overlays) it's really hard to get a screenshot from an outside app (if I'm mistaken, I'd appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction to how to do it).

An example of usage is for instance, the Amblone (DIY Ambilight) system which lights up the back of your TV/monitor according to what's on the screen. To know what colors to use, it takes screenshots of the screen and calculates the colors accordingly. Ofcourse, this has to be done often, so, performance is crucial. When using hardware overlay, this method does not work ofcourse. If on te other hand, there were some way to get a screenshot from the video, that would be great.
Ofcourse, a solution would be to turn off hardware overlay, but, hardware overlay is here to help so, most people will want to have it turned on.

I've researched quite a bit on how to capture the hardware overlay from another app, but as far as I can tell, it would be a lot of hacking and hard work, if even possible at all. Ofcourse, this feature is the domain of Amblone and other projects that use video screenshots, but, I think that it would be useful for BSPlayer to have this feature, which would allow people to easily do this type of projects and focus on the "cool stuff" and bless us with more cool features for bsplayer :)

[BSPeter]

For screenshots at intervals you could perhaps use ffdshow's "Grab"-feature.
(Grab every ... frame).
To check whether ffdshow-video decoder is used (and to access ffdshow's features):
rightclick (with moviefile loaded) > Options > Filters > Advanced
Concerning ambilight: did you find this old post by RafkeP re. Movie Mood Light or MoMoLight (thread dating back to mid-2006, i.e. about the time that the very first build of BS.Player version 2 was launched)?

[Bikonja]

Ffdshow does not HAVE to be used, so, it would be better if I could somehow get a screenshot/framegrab of the video regardless of ffdshow. However, I *think* that ffdshow is used in most cases. If I'm right in that assumption, then it would be ok to use ffdshow, yes.
But, if so, I could only find a .NET sample to interact with ffdshow. Since I'm already here, is anyone familiar with how to use ffdshows grab option from c++?

I did not see that post and I've already ordered my Arduino and led lights for the Amblone project, plus, Amblone is open source which allowed me to tweak it already (even though I haven't actually built it yet) to show my caps, scroll and num lock indicators with the lights, so, I would rather stick with Amblone, even though that's also an impressive project and it can grab overlay frames.

Also, I've dug around the BsPlayer plugin SDK and I've seen that I can call the frame grab action, but, it just does the frame grab feature with it's output to a file and notification on OSD. Would it be possible to grab a frame to memory?

[Tizio]

Hi Bikonja, what I wanted to suggest you was to use the BSplayer SDK to create a plugin, but you already found it yourself.

What you can do, to take a screenshot into memory, is to emulate a PRINT keyboard button keypress. This way, the selected frame will be saved into memory and you'll be able to handle it at your wish, for postprocessing or whatever you want.
Beware that the PRINT event could be renderer dependent, I doubt it will work if you choose a renderer which renders to Overlay, but you can do your own tests.

To create a plugin will be useful for you to correctly manage the actual playback time etc.

If you create a plugin, please, share it with us

[Bikonja]

Thank you for your suggestion, however, print screen does not, as you said, get the frame from overlay, which means it's better to just grab a screenshot "the normal way" then sending an emulated keypress for Print screen.

If you need a plugin that grabs a screenshot this way, I think I could whip something up quickly, but if it get's messy, I won't have time to do it. Let me know if you need it and I'll see if I can whip it up quickly.

[Tizio]

I don't actually need it, but it would be interesting for the others who requested that feature

I tried to take some PRINT screenshots with an Overlay renderer active, and the image is correctly available in memory. I'm under Windows 7, and probably it handles the Overlay layer in a different way than Windows XP and previous OSes did.

Anyway, 5 years ago, a former active BSplayer plugin maker (RafkeP), developed an Ambilight filter to be used with BSplayer. He also arranged an hardware project to emulate the Ambilight function.
Here the link to the discussion on this forum, and here the home of his project, with full tutorial and download links.

I hope to find the time to come back to my programming sessions... Maybe with a .Net language and not in VB6

[Bikonja]

I'm not sure how you're getting the image out of print screen, maybe Aero is running which uses overlay or something else is running that is using overlay so bsplayer defaults to playing without overlay, but for me, print screen does not get the image from video (and also, a weird thing happens, when I paste the print screen to paint, the rectangle where the video should be is actually a "window" to the overlay (if the location of the rectangle in paint coincides with the video playing in the background, it actually shows the video). But, when saving the file, even if video was visible in paint at the time of save, the saved image does not contain the video image.

BSPeter already pointed me to Rafke's project, but, as I said, I prefer Amblone (for reasons read my original post).
However, I'm intrigued by the idea of using a filter. I did google it before, but couldn't find anything, however, I did find some resources on making a filter so I'll try it out, maybe I manage to make a filter for frame grab.

.NET is real easy to use, Microsoft has really made and effort to make programming as easy as possible without losing too much control.