Hey, I never noticed that before....

Imagine in "The Doomsday Machine" where Scotty climbs up the jefferies tube to fix the transporter while another tech lifts off the plate on the floor to hand Scotty cables from above

 

The makers of Star Trek would never do such a thing. We all know that nothing on the ship ever changes position without warning:

https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/al...y-any-other-name/by-any-other-name-br-541.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/screencaps/season3/306-spocks-brain/spocks-brain-br-163.jpg

 

Maybe the Van Gelder Box™ (short side visible)?
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/al...ger-of-the-mind/dagger-of-the-mind-br-044.jpg

A very quick look at eps in production order I think has only The Menagerie with a transporter scene between Dagger and Squire so that box could still be sitting there, maybe?

 

It's too thin even for that (see the shadow on the bottom left).
I reckon that thing is 1cm thick at most, probably less:

 

@Mytran Yeah, that's definitive. Shame you didn't post that two days ago.

 

I blame Trekcore for not capturing every single second of every episode.
Can you believe I had to create those screenshots by hand??????

 

That's what happened when I tried to screenshot from Netflix. You'll need to use an actual disc or media file on your computer.

Speaking of which, here's another one - notice how long that lighter coloured section is! I think we are definitely dealing with a carpet panel, used to cover some damage or dirt on the existing floor.

 

Reasonable. I remain irked that they pulled down the DVD sreencaps.

First World problem.

Of course, the logical follow-on time sink would be to go see if this is the only episode.

 

Agreed. Although it seems ungrateful to complain (because it's a free resource) it was a very handy facility!

A tempting offer for a Saturday afternoon!
The floor is not always shown clearly, but Charlie X looks pretty clean and there doesn't seem to have changed when Lenore boards the ship in Conscience of the King.

The floor is slightly obscured in Galileo 7 but appears patch free. This is just one episode before Squire of Gothos.

The patch is still present 4 episodes later in Return of the Archons, but the black stud/handle is missing.

By the time of Space Seed and This Side of Paradise (6 episodes after Squire) the carpet patch is gone.


So what are we dealing with?
We can see from Charlie X that originally, the carpet had a lighter coloured strip near the wall. At some point the Transporter Room was recarpeted with a slightly more beige shade and this leftover piece from the original seems to have been cut down and laid on the floor, to cover something up - possibly damaged carpet, but more likely a power cable to the Transporter Console since the patch is later removed and the floor seems fine.

 

True and I didn't mean it in an ungrateful way. I just miss the lower-bandwidth option.

It's a very dreary Saturday here so I spent it binge-watching food shows with the wife, with some napping sprinkled in for good measure.
I did see these two images for Dagger of the Mind, one before van Gelder changes and one after:
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/al...ger-of-the-mind/dagger-of-the-mind-br-053.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/al...ger-of-the-mind/dagger-of-the-mind-br-066.jpg
Note the shadow deformations on the second image that read as a carpet/rug edge. I have yet to watch the scene in motion to check if there are clearer/better views.

 

I'm not sure it's fool proof, but disabling Hardware Accelerated video in your browser settings should allow screenshots to work again. Your computer will struggle more though, so don't forget to turn it back on.

 

It looks like a carpet wrinkle on dvd. I didn't see any better views though when watching it...

 

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you were ungrateful, just that I would feel that way if I were to grumble about it too much!

I would tend to agree, given that it vanishes when the lighting changes.

 

That might depend on how you are doing the screenshot. If you are using an OS-level screen capture, it might not include video. It varies by OS and hardware. That is, video might be a composited layer that the OS does not include. Solution? Use an app-level screen capture tool—built-in to the video player app.

If the app is a Web browser pulling down an on-line streaming service, then the blackout might be intentional anti-piracy.

For Windows users, I usually recommend VLC (videolan.org) because Windows Media Player (or whatever Microsoft is calling it now) is the worst. It can't deal with files that have multiple audio tracks, and can do some pretty screwy things with soft captioning, too. VLC is free, absolutely bristling with functionality, and multi-platform. And yes, it does screen captures.

 

On PC I use the browser app 'FireShot'

 

When a video is playing, I just hit the "Shift-Prt Scr" keys (Print Screen), then open the Paint app, and hit Ctrl-V to paste it in. Then just save as a jpeg.

 

What's your set up? That usually doesn't work, you'll just paste the black box.

 

I'm using Windows 11 on a desktop computer. I wonder if you're running into some weird kind of copy protection. To test that hypothesis, play any youtube video on full-screen, and try the simple "shift-prt scr" method to snap a moment, and then paste it into Paint or your preferred photo editor. It works for me on youtube all the time.

If you're surfing the Net from a cell phone, then I'm in the dark because I don't use one.

 

That settles it then. It's like this: Windows and MacOS launch a "windowing" service during boot, which is what creates the entire GUI (graphical user interface), or "desktop." The keyboard shortcut mentioned by Zap will capture everything appearing on-screen. And that's part of that "windowing" service.

(To put it in perspective, many distros of Linux do not automatically launch a windowing service if no monitor is detected during boot. A windowing service can be launched later with a terminal command.)

So it seems this Netflix player probably inserts the video "downstream" or after the operating system's windowing service, and before it gets to the GPU that drives your monitor. So no matter how hard you try, you can't capture stills or video because it's simply not there yet, so far as the operating system is concerned.

So what's with the black window? Many, many moons ago, when computers did not have frameworks for MPEG playback built-in to the OS, you needed a special video card to do that for you. The computer's video card fed into the MPEG card, which in turn fed the monitor. While setting up one of these cards, I remember having to align the MPEG frame within the black "holdout" area punched into the OS desktop. Imagine positioning a TV up-down-left-right to fit a window the exact size. Ergo, this Netflix player seems to be doing the same thing.

You could try an external capture device, but odds are it will be foiled by HDCP (anti-piracy) built into HDMI. Analog (like VGA) or DisplayPort might be foiled by the very same HDCP compliance (because they are not, or are compliant).

Put simply, capture from your DVDs or BDs. I know they're not as convenient as Netflix, or some other streaming service. But that's why home video servers were invented—so you don't have to sit through the same menu song-and-dance every time you watch your favorite discs, or those unskippable ads about how much better Blu-ray is.