As you know vlc media player allows you to take snap shot of image in video.I have mplayer on my open suse 10.3.So I downloaded mplayer-snapshot-0.3 whose description said it allows you to create thumbnail of video.Readme file in the tarball was empty.I have installed the tarball but don't know how to take snapshot.If anybody of you know about this or any other way to take snapshot in mplayer please inform.

One way, of course, would be to freeze MPlayer with <space bar> and then take a screenshot. Gimp does this under something like 'aquire' menu entry.

try 'mplayer -vo help'

To get screen shot of a window we press alt + printscreen.I did the same for mplayer window but the output image is full black.The same happens even in windows when you press printscreen to cut an image from window of a video player.That is why vlc player is favoured.

dear lugoteehalt,
Can you tell how to capture screen using gimp.

dear ozminh,
Which option should I select from choices of vo.Can you explain more.

At the top of the thing with the tools in it on the left of the screen there are a few menu items, including file and script fu from memory. In one of these there is the choice of, I think, 'aquire'. Click this. You may then choose whether to take a screen shot of the whole screen or just one window; you can do this on whatever desktop or virual window you like by clocking on what you want with the cursor which has turned into a crosss. Hope helps.

mplayer -vf screenshot mymovie.avi
Then, use the 's' key to take a screnshot.

It is easier to add this line:
into ~/.mplayer/config

Thanks to Agrouf,ErV for helpful answers.

To lugoteehalt
In gimp there is
xtns > script-fu > then following options
button
logo
make brush
misc
pattern
util
web page theme
Can you give exact details.

TIPS FOR ALL READERS

If you want to capture a frame from video which appears at 134th second then run following command in terminal
>mplayer <filepath> -vo png -ss 134 -frames 50
then press q to exit.
I like this because I can select all frames from given second whichever looks best.Also here frames mean stop after getting specified frames from time specified by ss.I found that value I gave for ss & the time that appeared in mplayer skin differed by 5 seconds so first play the video without capturing as
mplayer <file>
and when you see desired picture press space to pause & note the time from terminal then press q to quit then use that value when you capture frame in next run.
The images will be saved in the folder from which you ran mplayer command.
Comparison with windows
In windows i used to search for softwares like blazemedia pro,image video machine,image grab etc. to get screenshots but mplayer has got everything.Really linux scores over windows in many areas.

In mplayer when we press 's' on keyboard then that frame gets saved as png file.Is it possible to save that frame as jpg file(because it occupies less space) then what i have to do.

Probably possible to do it directly but one way of course is to open *.png in Gimp then save it as *.jpg.

pipe it to convert

To convert png file to jpg.What command should I give.Will it not require software like image magick or is it available by default?

image magick:
'convert background.jpg 1.png'