[MPlayer-users] Take/Dump Screenshot Feature

[Obsessive Maths Freak]

Good day to all. I'll start off in classic griper fashion by 
complaining. Apologies.

Well, no. I'll start off by saying that Mplayer/Mencoder is an awsome 
program. I doubt there's any other program that can do anywhere near the 
amount of stuff this program can.

However, as you may have guessed from my subject header, there's one 
thing Mplayer can't do. That is, take screenshots.

Now there are various "workarounds" for this problem. -vf png combined 
with -ss and -frames. There's also the option of external screenshot 
programs. Neither of these options is all that nice. Actually, they're 
terrible.

To ruffle the feathers of the faithful further, I'll mention that Xine 
has this feature. it's actually the only thing keeping me on Xine. But 
lately Xine's been having some aspect control issues, and to be honest 
I'd love to use Mplayer anyway.


Now, before you dismiss the idea outright, I'd just like to mention that 
I'm a programmer of sorts... c++--ish, and I did try to see if there was 
a way to quickly hack such a function in. I don't know exactly what I 
was thinking at the time, just barging into the code, but after I 
regained consciousness I still held onto some forlorn hope that maybe 
there was still some way, some how to do this.

But so help me, I am willing to try and hack out some kind of solution. 
And I mean hack. I'd just like a working prototype here.

As I see it, mplayer has some kind of png code in there, which might be 
usable. Ideally I suppose, it would just be a case of feeding the 
current pointer to the screen into some sort of png creator function. 
Obviously it's not going to be that simple, but if someone were to point 
  me in the general direction of approximately where I need to go, then 
I could try and hack something out. I could TRY. I can only fail, 
crushed beneath the magnitude of code and my own heedless arrogance!

This all sounds ridiculous, and it probably is. but at the moment, I 
have nothing better to do with my time that trawl through code. So I'm 
willing to give it a shot, if anyone can suggest what needs to be done, 
with regards to input, a screen array handle and the png code. Maybe 
this is just lunacy. If so, just say so. but if there's a small chance 
of it working, let me know.


P.S. It really would be cool if Mplayer could do this.