Screenshot

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For the Wikipedia page, see Wikipedia:Software screenshots.
Screenshot of an ubuntu desktop.
Screenshot of an ubuntu desktop.

A screenshot, screen capture, or screen dump is an image taken by the computer to record the visible items displayed on the monitor or another visual output device. Usually this is a digital image taken by the host operating system or software running on the computer device, but it can also be a capture made by a camera or a device intercepting the video output of the computer.

Screenshots, screen dumps, or screen captures can be used to demonstrate a program, a particular problem a user might be having or generally when computer output needs to be shown to others or archived.

All three terms are often used interchangeably; however, some people distinguish between them as follows:

Screenshot
Outputting the entire screen in a common bitmap image format such as BMP, PNG, or JPEG.
Screen dump
The display system dumps what it is using internally upon request, such as XWD X Window Dump image data in the case of X11 or PNG in the case of Mac OS X.
Screen capture (screencaps) 
Capturing the screen over an extended period of time to form a video file. (see video capture)

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[edit] Game screenshots

Screenshots are used on packaging video games. Throughout the history of screenshots, there have been some deceptive practices, such as using a screenshot from a computer platform with better graphics.[citation needed] Due to complaints by consumers, software companies began putting captions below games such as "Screenshot from Amiga version" or "Actual C64 screenshot".[citation needed]

In the 1990s, when pre-rendered or filmed videos became a part of intermissions in games, some game boxes included screenshots from the in-game videos, which deceived potential buyers about overall game play.[citation needed]

[edit] Internet uses

It has become popular in the internet fandom culture to use screencaps of movies and television shows in the creation of fanart, most commonly as icons for LiveJournal, MSN Messenger, and Internet forums about those topics. Websites and various communities have been created to distribute these screencaps.

[edit] Built in screenshot functionality

[edit] Mac OS X

Pressing Command-Shift-3 takes a screenshot of the entire screen, and Command-Shift-4 takes a screenshot of a chosen area of the screen or if you press Space afterwards you can choose a window on the screen to individually screenshot. These images are saved to the desktop, but if you hold down the control key with the rest of the keyboard shortcut, the pictures are copied to the clipboard instead. These shortcuts also work in Mac OS Classic.

You can also use the Grab application to take screenshots.

A shell utility called "screencapture" (located in /usr/sbin/screencapture) can be used from the Terminal application or in shell scripts to capture screenshots and save them to files. Various options are available to choose the file format of the screenshot, how the screenshot is captured, if sounds are played, etc. The manual page (available via the command "man screencapture") explains all the options. This utility might only be available when the Mac OS X developer tools are installed.

[edit] Microsoft Windows

Pressing the Print Screen key captures a screenshot of the entire desktop area, and places it in the clipboard. Pressing the combination of Alt-Print Screen captures only the current active window. However, by first pressing Alt, then the hotkey of the dropdown menu you wish to illustrate, you can capture dropdown menu contents. In most versions of Windows, screenshots captured this way do not include the mouse pointer.

Video content in programs using a hardware overlay video renderer is not captured.[citation needed] Windows Media Player on Windows XP in its default configuration on supported hardware is effected by this.

By default, Windows does not save the screenshot to an image file; the user is required to paste the image into a separate imaging program (such as Microsoft Paint which is built-in) for saving. Some programs, however, particularly multiplayer online games, will automatically save screenshots in a specified folder. As of Windows XP, it is no longer possible to take screenshots of full-screen DOS windows without other software.

The print screen button uses “keybd_event” API to capture screen.[citation needed]

Windows Vista includes a utility called Snipping Tool, first introduced in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. It is a screen-capture tool, that allows for taking screenshots (called snips) of windows, rectangular areas, or a free-form area. Snips can then be annotated, saved as an image file or as an HTML page, or emailed.

For programmatic access, application developers can use GDI, DirectX or the Windows Media Encoder API to capture the screen.[citation needed]

[edit] X Window System

gnome-screenshot (German version) in Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS using Gnome 2.14.3
gnome-screenshot (German version) in Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS using Gnome 2.14.3

Since X Window System itself is not a desktop environment and only includes a very basic set of programs, methods of taking screenshots vary greatly on the platform. While xwd(1) is the closest "standard" way to do it in the X Window System, most people use other bundled utilities to achieve the task due to their ease of use.

[edit] Video screen captures

None of the major operating systems have built-in mechanisms to record videos of the screen (recording how the user moves his mouse around, clicks icons, types text etc. as a movie). A multitude of utilities have come up to fill this void, though.

[edit] Third party screenshot software

There are many third-party programs available on different platforms to take screenshots with advanced functionality. Some computer graphics software (e.g., IrfanView, GIMP, SnagIt, and PSP) can acquire screenshots. Typically, these programs can be configured to include or exclude the mouse pointer, automatically crop out everything but the client area of the active window, take timed shots, areas of the screen not visible on the monitor (autoscroll), and so on.

[edit] Common technical issues

[edit] Hardware overlays

Screenshots of games and media players sometimes fail, resulting in a blank rectangle. The reason for this is that the graphics are bypassing the normal screen and going to a high-speed graphics processor on the graphics card called the hardware overlay. Generally, there is no way to extract a computed image back out of the graphics card, though software may exist for special cases or specific video cards.

One way these images can be captured is to turn off the hardware overlay. Because many computers have no hardware overlay, most programs are built to work without it, just a little slower. In Windows XP, this is disabled by opening the Display Properties menu, clicking on the "Settings" tab, clicking, "Advanced", "Troubleshoot", and moving the Hardware Acceleration Slider to "None."

DVDs are often encrypted using a patented algorithm called Content-scrambling system or CSS, making it much more difficult to take screenshots of them. Many DVD-capable media players will only play them on the overlay layer, where they cannot be captured.

[edit] Screen recording

The screen recording capability of some screen capture programs is a time-saving way to create instructions and presentations, but the resulting files are often large.

A common problem with video recordings is the action jumps, instead of flowing smoothly, due to low frame rate. Though getting faster all the time, ordinary PCs are not yet fast enough to play videos and simultaneously capture them at professional frame rates, i.e. 30 frame/s. For many cases, high frame rates are not required. This is not generally an issue if simply capturing desktop video, which requires far less processing power than video playback, and it is very possible to capture at 30 frame/s. This of course varies depending on desktop resolution, processing requirements needed for the application that is being captured, and many other factors.

[edit] Copyright issues

Some companies believe the use of screenshots is an infringement of copyright on their program, as it is a derivative work of the widgets and other art created for the software.[1][2] Regardless of copyright, screenshots may still be legally used under the principle of fair use in the U.S. or fair dealing and similar laws in other countries.[3][4]

Preventing copying is one of the issues that Trusted Computing seeks to address. Under Trusted Computing, programs will be able to prevent the taking of screenshots of their windows.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Screen Shots (Excluding Xbox). Use of Microsoft Copyrighted Content. Retrieved on 2007-08-22.
  2. ^ Question: What are screenshots, and is using them copyright infringement?. FAQ about Copyright -- Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. Retrieved on 2007-08-22.
  3. ^ Copyright in screenshots? Who owns it?. MetaFilter. Retrieved on 2007-08-22.
  4. ^ Ask the Law Geek: Is publishing screenshots Fair Use?. Lifehacker. Retrieved on 2007-08-22.

[edit] External links