Currently I have lots of videos in avi format. I would like to be able to take images from these avi's for my own use, say, avatars or other types of fan art. I'm also interested in creating animated gifs. However thusfar I have been thwarted by the inability to use printscreen to capture images. I'm sure there are programs that could help me with this, but I thought I'd ask here before stumbling around across the intarwebs for an answer.

thanks.

Try using the screenshot feature on your media player.

I typically use bsplayer, sometimes I use vlc.

Google is your friend.

VLC works fairly well for me.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ to play, encode, transcode, whatever. Plays just about every codec in existence. You can even make it output every frame into a jpeg or png.

http://www.gimp.org/ image manipulation, makes animated gifs, the closest thing to photoshop you can get for free.

Both are open source and free.

cut it up and export to .bmp with VirtualDub