Take Snapshots of Videos with WPF

With WPF's Imaging-Classes you can take snapshots of any Visual. The snapshot can be saved in any common Image-Format, like e.g. JPG. Let's take a look at a pretty short example, that shows how easy this can be done. The example takes snapshots of a Video. The following Window contains a MediaElement and a Button. The MediaElement plays the Video thomasOnBoard.wmv. The Button defines an Eventhandler for the Click-Event. It takes a snapshot of the video, when you click it.
<Window x:Class="SnapShots.Window1"

   <MediaElement x:Name="media" Height="200" Stretch="Fill">
       <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="MediaElement.Loaded">
     <Button Click="Button_Click" Content="Snapshot"/>
Let's look at the Eventhandler of the Button. An instance of the RenderTargetBitmap-class is created with some parameters about image-size, dots per inch (dpi) and Pixelformat. The Render-Method gets the MediaElement as a parameter, so MediaElements visual appearance is stored in the RenderTargetBitmap in memory. With a JpegBitmapEncoder and a FileStream the Image is written as a JPG to disk. That's it.
void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
  Size dpi = new Size(96,96);
  RenderTargetBitmap bmp = 
    new RenderTargetBitmap(300, 200, 
      dpi.Width, dpi.Height, PixelFormats.Pbgra32);

  JpegBitmapEncoder encoder = new JpegBitmapEncoder();

  string filename = Guid.NewGuid().ToString()+".jpg";
  FileStream fs = new FileStream(filename,FileMode.Create);

Instead of taking the picture in the Button_Click eventhandler, you could create a Timer and take an Image every 0.1s. That allows you to extract an image-sequence of your videos. As it works for any Visual, and everything that's on the screen in a WPF-Application is a visual, there are many things you can do with it. You could create a snapshot of an Image drawn to an inkCanvas, upload it to a webserver to display it on a webpage etc.