I've got a bunch of AVI movies that I caputured with my Canon Powershot G3. I want to extract still image frames, suitable for placing on the web, so somebody might actually want to click on them to watch the videos. Well, I've been through every damn shareware/freeware editor or player, and none of them seem to support a "save current frame as..." option, even software like the otherwise-appealing VirtualDub (which does have an option to save every frame into sequentially-numbered files, but that's kludgy).

Does anybody know a Windows tool that lets me extract still frames from AVIs? Such a seemingly simple thing to want to do. If I have to, I'll break down and start doing screen captures and cropping off the player chrome, but that's a pain...

Well, an easy way to do it would be to open the video, pause it on something you like, press printscreen, and paste it into an image editing program.

*edit*
Actually, the trick to that is, when you've paused it on the frame you want, minimize the player, restore it, and move it around. If the video inside the player is moving around right with it, it can be captured with printscreen. If it's sort of "lagging" behind the window when you move it around, minimize it and restore it again. It's weird, but it works.

Try this:

http://www.gromada.com/VideoMach.html

I used it a while back for the same purpose (extracting images from videos.) It does other stuff too.

This turns out to work well enough for what I want, although it's clearly aimed at doing other things. If I have to keep doing this, I'll probably hack the Java Media player thing from Sun, since they include the source code.