Some Sage Advice

Ever since OS X came out, Apple made sure that it would not be possible to take a screenshot of a DVD. When DVD Player is open, you can’t capture the screen with Grab, Command-Shift-3, or Command-Shift-4.  This makes it impossible to take a screen capture from a movie you are watching.

Here are two options for you.

Option 1: Don’t use Apple’s DVD Player

Apple’s built-in DVD player is great and convenient but it isn’t your only option for watching DVDs. There is a free alternative video player called VLC Media Player which handle more video types than Apple’s. And, as we mentioned earlier, it is free! You can download a copy at

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

With VLC Player you can do a normal screen capture.

Option 2: Use Apple’s DVD Player with a Secret Workaround

If you don’t want yet another piece of software on your Mac, you can still use Apple’s DVD Player to play your movie but you must use the terminal to capture the screen. Follow these instructions to capture your video frame. (Note: You can only capture a single frame, not the playing video.)
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. Pause the movie at the frame you want to capture.

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

screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.png

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.png” will appear on your desktop.

That’s it! To capture more frames, just change the filename in terminal from dvd.png to dvd1.png, dvd2.png, and so on.

Apple Mail is not one of my favorite email programs (I personally prefer Microsoft Entourage instead) as it seems to have lots of strange problems. And with the latest system updates, Mail continues to cause users grief. Here are some more tips to help you if you are having some Mail problems.

Mail Preferences Removal

For many people, Mail problems have been fixed by removing the Mail preferences file. This file is located in the /username/Library/Preferences/ folder and is called com.apple.Mail.plist. Removing this file and relaunching Mail should help if this file is corrupted.

Remove the “Mail” Folder

It appears this problem may be caused by Mail not properly associating the “Mail” data folder to the program at launch. The following procedure should help fake it to Mail to use the current storage folder.

• Locate the /username/Library/Mail/ folder and drag it to the Desktop
• Launch “Mail” and wait for the prompt to import messages
• Move the newly created “Mail” folder from /username/Library/ to the trash and drag the old one from the desktop back to this location.
• Click “continue” in Mail’s setup window to import messages.
• Try quitting and relaunching Mail after this procedure is complete.