Mac boffins: A DVD screen capture widget?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Okay, I’m an idiot on this stuff, so be gentle.

When I’m watching a DVD on my iMac, I’d like to be able to stop the action and then take a picture of the screen and save it as a jpeg or whatever. The standard Mac DVD Player doesn’t seem to have this ability; when I try the obvious things, like dragging a frame around the screen and hitting Apple-C, I get a message that that function isn’t permitted (or is it “enabled”).

Is there some Dashboard widget I can download to do this? I read once about command-shift-3 being a way to take a picture of a window; would that work? (That just occurred to me, but I’m not in a position to check it right now, being 20 miles away from my Mac.)

2

You can capture DVD images by using a different player to play the DVD. I’ve used VLC media player in the past; it seems to work pretty well.

Hope this helps!

3

You can also use Snapz Pro but it’s not free
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

4

Apple’s DVD player deliberately disables screen caps, including cmd-shft-3. Use VLC as one of the earlier posters suggested.

5

I use DVD Capture, myself. Works fine for me, and you can use it with the normal Apple DVD player.

6

PowerDVD, which comes OEM with some DVD drives, has a frame capture button.

7

Thanks to all who responded.

While Googling around, I found this hack (about halfway down) and created DVD Player Scripts which seem to do the trick. It’s absurdly simple, too, which I found strange.