Take video snapshot using VLC media player

In an earlier post, we talked about how to take video snapshot using the Print Screen key on Windows computer. It is really handy for PC users to extract images or frames from videos since no extra software or installation required. The problem of video snapshot in this way is the snapshot quality issue as it can not extract full resolution images if the source video is very large, say 4K videos, full HD videos.

VLC media player is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player. It is so powerful to play most multimedia files, media codecs and video formats. Other than playing all kinds of videos, audios and movies on various devices, it also offers plenty of useful tools and utilities. You can download this free video player and find more details about this tool below.

Taking video snapshot using VLC media player

If you only want to convert videos to photos, or export images from movies, you do not need to buy an advanced video editor. The free and open source movie player can also do the same thing as a professional video editor. Run VLC media player on your PC or Mac computer, click Media menu from the top, then choose Open File…., to find the video or movie you like to extract frames from and load it on to the video player. Play the video to the point or frame you like to capture and pause, you can also drag the slider to quickly jump to the image or frame of the video you like to save, then click Video menu and choose ‘Take Snapshot‘ item to save the image frame of the video to your computer hard drive.

take video snapshot in vlc media player for windows

If you are using a Windows PC, the video snapshots will be saved to C:/users/yourusername/pictures. Open this folder in the File Manager on PC, you will find all video snapshots are saved as PNG files there and they will be in the full resolution as the source video, its width/height pixels will be the same as your video.