Scenegrabber .NET is a free program that can capture screenshots from videos and create a preview thumbnail sheet for each video and save it as an image. The program can create these “sceneshots” for multiple videos in batch based on your desired settings. Scenegrabber can view/play any video that is playable on your machine using installed system codecs.
See the screenshot to the right above to get a sense of what this program can do. The actual purpose of these “scenesheets” is a bit open ended and really depends on your needs and the way you manage or view your video collection. For example, you could use Scenegrabber to batch-create a library of these thumbnail sheets that you can use for content preview purposes, especially if you have a great number of videos in your collection and/or you are not entirely familiar with the content.
You could save these images in a single, centralized location or otherwise save each “scenesheet” in the same folder as the video itself. This would be especially handy if you use your PC as a primary media player. Moreover, these thumbnail sheets could be very useful for content preview purposes if you are publishing videos on the internet.
If you can think up a practical use for these thumbnail sheets that is not mention it please share it in the comments. Here are more notes on this program:
- Manual vs. automatic: you could jump to specific points in the video and grab specific screenshots manually, or otherwise click “grab screenshotS” and have the program automatically scan the length of the video and grab images for you.
- The settings: you can specify the length and width of the output image in pixels, the number of columns to use, as well as the number of screenshots to grab.
Video information: Scenegrabber .NET is able to display extensive video information, much like MediaInfo, for example.- Editing the sceneshot: aside from the settings above, the program will create captions for each image that contain the timestamp for each image. You can edit these manually to whatever text you like, change the font size or color, or even do away with captions altogether. You can also drag thumbnails to rearrange them as well as specify the media info fields that are displayed with the thumbnails.
- Formats supported: supports any video file that is playable on Windows Media Player; if you have the appropriate codec installed on your system it will load up the video.
The verdict: a very nice, handy program, especially if you are looking for a functionality such as this or if you are looking for a quick and easy way to preview videos.
Note that there may be an issue with WMV format videos, but that the author is aware of this and it will be fixed.
Version Tested: 0.9.3.1
Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, Seven. 32bit or 64bit. .NET Framework 3.5 is required for XP.
Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 2.81 megs).
