🚀 go-pugleaf

Hs wrote:
>   Sometimes when a video player like "MediaPlayer" is playing a video and
> I capture a desktop screenshot using BitBlt() function, the result screenshot
> contains a black filled rectangle instead of a frame of the playing video.
> How can I capture the frame too? Should I use DirectX or Mirror Drivers to
> capture? Why it happens only sometimes in some PCs I test? Is there any
> special setting common in video players for this?
> 
> Thanks.

This occurs when the video is being rendered by hardware overlay. This 
can even occur on Vista when Aero is not enabled - but won't be a 
problem on Vista when Aero is enabled.

There's no way to capture this hardware overlay short of disabling 
hardware acceleration or writing graphics hardware specific code.

You can generally configure Media Players not to use the hardware 
overlay so you can make screen captures. Here's how to do it using 
Windows Media Player: Open Tools -> Options -> Performance(tab) -> 
Advanced(button) then in the Video Acceleration section check "Use video 
mixing renderer" and "Use high quality mode". You could also check "Turn 
on DirectX Video Acceleration" to improve performance if you wish.