Q: Does any one of your staff know if there is a way to extract the text from a WMV file? Someone has sent me a WMV file with scrolling text on a black background. I would like to extract the text so that I can print it out.
A: As far as we know there isn’t an easy way of doing this. Once the file has been rendered into WMV format the text has become part of the video stream and there’s no way to extract it directly since it doesn’t exist as ASCII characters any more.
You could get around the problem by stepping through the movie frame-by-frame using Windows Media Player. Then take a screen grab of each block of text with the Snipping Tool (in Vista or Windows 7), or a free program like PicPick in earlier versions of Windows, and save these as images which you could print out. Alternatively use VLC Media Player which has a built-in screen capture feature. To go a step further you may then be able to scan the image files with an optical character reader such as TopOCR in order to recreate editable text.
You can use the Snipping Tool to capture individual frames from a video file or DVD
Originally featured in PCU124
