Wanting to keep a record of interesting things he sees on screen, Robert Irvine tries to…
Easy when you Know How
In a change to our advertised programme, I won’t be writing about Bing’s new AI-powered chat tool this issue, because I’m still on the waiting list to try it. In the meantime, I’ve been watching lots of old telly on the Gold channel.
The other night, I was surprised to see a colour episode of classic black-and-white sitcom Hancock’s Half Hour. I took a photo on my phone to confirm I wasn’t imagining things (two episodes have been ‘colourised’ – see www.snipca. com/45254), but as with most pictures of TV screens it looked grainy and wonky.
This made me wonder if it was possible to capture screenshots of what’s on your smart TV, so you can save amusing and interesting moments in decent quality. Some remote controls let you take screenshots by pressing their power and volume-down buttons simultaneously – like you do on a phone or tablet – but typically, mine doesn’t. I turned instead to a tool called Button Mapper, which lets you assign different actions to the buttons on your remote control.
I installed Button Mapper on my Google TV via the Google Play Store (www.snipca.com/45257) and opened the app. As instructed on screen, I went to Settings then System, selected Accessibility and switched on the Enable option for Button Mapper.
Back in the app, I selected Add Buttons (twice) and pressed my remote’s ‘TV input’ button to use as my screenshot function. I selected No Thanks when prompted to upgrade to the Pro version of Button Mapper and switched on Customize. I then chose ‘Long press’ followed by Screenshot in the Actions menu (see screenshot above).
To test that the new action worked, I long–pressed the TV-input button on my remote control and Button Mapper instantly captured a screenshot. As this was just a boring picture of its Settings screen, I then tried to capture some actual content.
Sadly, my attempts to do so in Netflix, Prime Video and iPlayer merely resulted in empty black images, as these services block screenshots for copyright reasons, but on ITVX I successfully grabbed what was playing. I was also able to capture anything static, such as app home screens and programme information.
To transfer the screenshots from my TV to my PC, I installed the free app X-plore File Manager (www.snipca.com/42475). I opened ‘Internal shared storage’ and selected Pictures, then Screenshots to locate my images. I pressed ‘Mark files’ in the central toolbar,
