As you're about to find out, I know nothing about cameras.
I've got a question regarding my wife's digital video camera.
I don't know the brand or anything but it burns onto a mini DVD disc.
I can play this disc on my computer but I was wondering if it's possible to
pick a still picture out of the middle of a video. For example, say you're videoing out the wind screen as you're doing a loop. Can you pull a still picture out of that video at the instant the horizon come back into the top of the windscreen?

Capt. Kirk wrote:As you're about to find out, I know nothing about cameras.
I've got a question regarding my wife's digital video camera.
I don't know the brand or anything but it burns onto a mini DVD disc.
I can play this disc on my computer but I was wondering if it's possible to
pick a still picture out of the middle of a video. For example, say you're videoing out the wind screen as you're doing a loop. Can you pull a still picture out of that video at the instant the horizon come back into the top of the windscreen?

Yes, you can. You need video editing software which is free from a number of places on the web. A popular company is Ulead.

http://www.ulead.com/runme.htm

Download one of their programs like Video Studio 11 using the free trial. There's a bit of a learning curve with this software of this type but you can make some cool stuff. Windows Xp also has a basic movie making software, haven't used it so not sure if you can pick a frame off of there.

Does the DVD that comes out of the camera play on a normal DVD player? Or as a DVD in your computer?

If so, download the free Videolan VLC media player. It's open source and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It plays EVERYTHING. DVDs, mov, avi, wmv, mpg, whatever. Just load your disc and do File > Open > Disc.

Find the frame you want, pause, and do the Screenshot command. It saves it to a .png file, which is roughly synonomous with .jpg.

If the DVD won't play as a DVD, but rather just is used as a storage media for raw digital video, you'll have to download it from the camera and encode it to a popular video format using a program like Bonanza Mang mentioned.