How To Capture Minecraft Screenshots On The Raspberry Pi

In a previous post I told you how you could capture screenshots on the Raspberry Pi using “scrot”. That method worked fine for most applications but like many screen capture techniques resulted in a black rectangle when used with Minecraft. This has led many bloggers to simply photograph the screen with a real camera in order to get a screenshot of their Minecraft adventures.

There is a solution and it comes in the form of “raspi2png” by Andrew Duncan. His raspi2png utility can capture the Minecraft window and is available from his Github page.

Setting up raspi2png is easy so keep on reading!

Step 1 – Install libpng12-dev

This is installed by default in the latest Raspbian image so we can move onto the next step.

Step 2 – Download raspi2png

Now we can download the project files from Github :

git clone https://github.com/AndrewFromMelbourne/raspi2png/

To make it easier to use from any location we can copy the raspi2png executable into a location that the operating system will find it :

sudo cp -a raspi2png/raspi2png /usr/local/bin

This will copy the executable in the raspi2png directory to the /usr/local/bin directory while preserving the file’s attributes.

Step 3 – Capturing the screen

Capturing the screen is simply a case of running the following command :

raspi2png

The screenshot is saved as “screenshot.png” in the same directory as the raspi2png files. This can be copied to a USB stick or transferred via SSH.

There are some command line options you can use for some added functionality :

Usage: raspi2png [-p pngname] [-v] [-w ] [-h ] [-t ] [-d ]
-p - name of png file to create (default is snapshot.png)
-v - verbose
-h - image height (default is screen height)
-w - image width (default is screen width)
-t - type of image captured
     can be one of the following: RGB565 RGB888 RGBA16 RGBA32
-d - delay in seconds (default 0)

The most useful are d and p. For example :

raspi2png -d 5 -p "mysnapshot_01.png"

This creates an image file called “mysnapshot_01.png” after a delay of 5 seconds.

The delay is useful if you need time to arrange your windows before the screen capture takes place. Being able to specify the image file name is useful if you want to capture a series of images without re-using the default “snapshot.png” file.

When taking Minecraft screenshots you will need to use the following process :

1. Launch a LXTerminal window
2. Run Minecraft and decide what you want to capture
3. Press TAB to release the mouse
4. Use the mouse to click in your terminal window
5. Type the raspi2png command as above with a delay of 5 seconds
6. Press Enter
7. Click the Minecraft window to return to the game
8. Wait for raspi2png to take the screenshot

Repeat steps 3-8 using a different file name as required.

Here are some shots I took. I have cropped the images (using Gimp) to just focus on the Minecraft window :

Although I originally discovered raspi2png while looking to capture Minecraft images you can use it for your other screen capture needs as well.