New Features/Improvements to BS.Player

[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.

[adicoto]

Just an ideea, I am not sure if this help....but...
BSPlayer has also the grab function (key P), which saves a frame capture of the movie playing. I guess, before saving it to hard drive, it's grabed into memory. So, emulating P key pressing would capture frames. Could them be captured by a plugin and be used ?

[Bikonja]

I'm not currently at my computer so I can't check to be sure, but as far as I know (and my logic agrees with this), P is only a shortcut that starts the command "Grab frame" and it doesn't matter if the "Grab frame" command was started using a keyboard shortcut or a context menu item click or a timer or whatever, it still doesn't let you use the screenshot in memory, it only outputs it to a file. If that is the case, the BSPlayer SDK has a GrabFrame function that invokes the same command, meaning I would not have to emulate a keypress to get this.

Thank you for the idea though.