HOWTO defeat Apple's anti-DVD-screenshot DRM

Apple disables the OS X screenshot capability while a DVD is playing (this is a giant pain in the ass if you've got a little DVD playing in the corner of the screen while blogging and you have to quit the player when you want to take a screenshot of your browser). There's a work-around, though, for those times when you want to make a (generally speaking, perfectly lawful) screenshot of your DVD player:

1) Put your DVD in your computer and open DVD Player (Applications -> DVD Player) if it does not open automatically. Go to Video -> Maximum Size, or hit Command-3. Fast forward to the frame you want to capture, or select the scene to start at.

2) Open the Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal). Type this, or copy / paste it right in the Terminal:

screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.jpg

Your mouse should turn into crosshairs. Now hit the space bar. Your mouse should now be a camera. Click the window the DVD is playing in. A file called "dvd.jpg" will appear on your desktop.

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Update: Kirk sez, "This is not entirely correct. screencapture's default image format is PNG; adding a .jpg extension does not change this. There's a flag in the man page for screencapture, but the format codes are not documented (and the man page even admits this...). (And I can't get it to work.)

You can change the default format with a simple command - see this article on Mac OS X Hints.

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