How to Take Fullscreen DVD Screen Captures in Mac OS X Using FreeSnap

When it comes to taking screen captures in Apple's DVD Player, the built-in Mac OS X screen capture tools are useless. Try to use the built-in screenshot shortcut (Shift-Command-3) while DVD Player is running, and you get nothing more than an error beep. Using Grab, the screen capture utility that comes on your Mac, you get similar results––an error message that says "Screen grabs are unavailable during DVD playback. Please quit DVD Player first."

In spite of these limitations, there is a way to capture fullscreen shots from DVD's. Actually, there are a couple of ways, but only one that is simple and straightforward.

The not-so-easy way is to download VLC Player from Version Tracker, http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/. VLC is a free open-source video and audio player that is capable of playing almost any kind of video you give it, including VCD's (video CD's) and MPEG-4 files. It has a built-in screen capture feature, but it won't take shots at fullscreen resolution. This is fine if you don't want to blow up your screenshots to fullscreen size. The built-in Mac OS X shortcuts also work in VLC, but screenshots taken this way are saved as PDF's, so if you want to be able to use the images in iPhoto, you will have to download a program like DropJPG (free) to convert them into JPEG files. The big problem with VLC Player, besides that it isn't fully developed yet, is that you can't step through individual frames, making it very difficult to catch the perfect shot.

The best way is to use DVD Player and FreeSnap, a free screenshot application. There are other freeware programs that some people might find more to their liking (SnapNDrag, GrabMac, & Capture Me to name a few). But I found FreeSnap to be the easiest to use for the purpose of taking fullscreen DVD captures.

All it takes is five steps:

1. Download (again from Version Tracker, http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/). FreeSnap requires Mac OS 10.2 or higher.

2. Install (Drag application icon to your Applications folder).

3. Start and set up FreeSnap.

4. Launch DVD Player in fullscreen mode and pause the scene you want to capture.