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I spent some 2+ hours looking for a solution to create a singe JPG file with many snapshots from a single video file.

It should have been a simple task: Media Player Classic even has a “save thumbnails” menu option! But the fact is that the easy solutions are all limited to an unacceptable extent.

Here is what I needed:

- a software that could run flawlessly in Windows 7 64 bits;
- a solution that could handle not only regular video formats but relatively more exotic files, like my Canon’s HV20 .m2t 1080 lines contents;
- the ability to configure the resolution of the snapshots to be included in the output JPG;
- the ability to configure how many snapshots and how many columns of snapshots should be present in the output;
- free or, if payed, [near] perfect for the job.

Any search engine search, including Google’s, will provide poor results: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is killing search itself, for years now.

Still, with care one would end up with results pointing to GOOD proposals like:

(1) SceneGrabber .NET
(2) ImageGrabber II .NET
(3) Video Thumbnails Maker
(4) Free Video to JPG Converter
(5) AMT (Auto-Movie-Thumbnailer)
(6) Windows Media Player Classic

but all these have problems, namely:

- unable to handle my .m2t files without crashing (1, 5)
- unable to run on x64 systems  (2)
- unable to output to a SINGLE file, even if supporting simple individual snapshots extraction (3, 4), hence tested no further
- can’t really output what is requested when the output file must have huge resolutions, like 2560×25560 pixels [no mistake on your left] (6)
- consuming so much memory, that it would violate the 2 GB ram limit per 32 bits process (1 with FFMPEG addon)
- not free and VERY far from perfect (everything with a “trial” option I could find)

But I did found a solution, although requiring me to go back in time, using the historical archives of the WWW, available from web.archive.org.

Straight to point, the solution I found is “ImageGrabber II“, but NOT the .NET version – the previous version, which runs fine in any Windows O.S.

You can get it here

http://web.archive.org/web/20061004212351/http://www45.brinkster.com/antworkz/

and nowhere else, as far as I know.

This solution satisfies all my requirements! Congratulations to the author Serkan Ergun!