VLC & SMPlayer Snapshot is Not Working. This is How to Fix It!.

For me one of the tool that “a must have” if I want to download a video player is a screenshot. This is probably because of my blogging activity, create gifs and motion graphics. What about you?. How important is the screenshot feature in the video player?. For the past 2 months, the screenshot feature on 2 video players I use, VLC & SMPlayer, doesn’t seems work at all. So for temporary I use screenshots in-built video player [Ubuntu 16.04] which is unfortunately is not always function properly.

This problem appear after I updated from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 version. But, it turned out just a setting preferences mistake, not bugs. If you experience the same problem, here’s how to fix it.

VLC

Open your VLC player and access Tools —> Preferences —> Input/Codecs. In Codecs (Hardware-accelerated decoding) section there are several options that you can choose. Select one of the option from the bottom three as shown below. You can see I chose Disable.

VLC & SMPlayer Snapshot is Not Working. This is How to Fix It

Don’t forget to click the Save button. Now try taking a snapshot (video —> take snapshot). The snapshot display will appear for just a few seconds at the top left of the VLC screen. You can check the png /jpg file in path directory.

SMPlayer

The advantages of SMPlayer screenshot feature over VLC is that you can take a series of screenshots (frames) of a film scene in one session. If you like making gifs, this feature is very useful. The problem that makes screenshots in SMPlayer not working is the path folder is not created. This folder will not be created automatically, so first you must create it manually (Options —> Preferences —> General). For an example of naming folders and files (templates), please see the image below:

At this point, screenshots should function properly. But just in case, in the video section, change the output driver to xv. And in the Performance —> Decoding section, make sure the hardware decoding is vdpau. Click Apply and OK. To start taking screenshots, just click videos —> screenshots (S) or start/stop taking screenshots (Shift D).

Hopefully this article can solve your VLC and SMPlayer snapshot problem. Good luck :)…

One thought on “VLC & SMPlayer Snapshot is Not Working. This is How to Fix It!.”

  1. Thanks for explaining this. VLC screenshots works now.
    It did require a restart of VLC on Linux in my case.

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