YouTube screenshot

How to take the screenshot

1. Load the video and set its quality on the player itself. A capture is a photograph of what is playing, so a 720p stream gives a 720p screenshot however large the window is.
2. Start capturing. "Capture this player" asks the browser to offer this tab first, which is almost always the one you want.
3. Play it normally and press Freeze when you see the moment. Then capture, and take as many as you like.

Why Freeze rather than pause

Pausing a YouTube video draws its play button and its scrubber over the picture, and those are the two things a screenshot of a video must not contain. Freeze takes one frame and holds it while the video underneath goes on playing, so YouTube never enters its paused state and never draws a control over the frame you are looking at.

Why not just press Print Screen

A screenshot of your screen captures your screen: the player's controls if they were showing, the browser's own chrome, your display's colour handling, and the picture at whatever size it happened to be on screen rather than at the size it was encoded. This takes the frame from the video itself.

When the capture comes back black

Some video plays through an encrypted path that blanks out under screen sharing. The capture succeeds and returns a black rectangle, and there is no way round it from a web page: that is the protection doing exactly what it was built to do.

What you may do with the frame

A still from a video carries the same copyright as the video. Commentary, criticism, teaching and news reporting have fair dealing and fair use arguments behind them depending on where you are; reposting somebody else's frame as your own content does not.