Take full screen DVD snapshots

Here's the no dollar solution: pause the movie, fire up "Grab" and caputure the screen.

(OK, last post, promise. :-) I also lost the last line of my post the first time 'round.)

That script takes a screen capture, saves it with a unique filename, and advances the DVD one frame. Works in 10.3.9.

TUAW gagged on the angle-brackets in my script. Should be...

#!/bin/sh
screencapture `date "+%s"`.pdf
osascript (( EOF
tell app "DVD Player"
step dvd
end tell
EOF

but use two less-than signs (shift-comma) where you see the '((' above.

You can also do this from the command line for free, or with an apple script. Apple didn't disable the screenshot functionality when DVDs are playing--just the keyboard shortcut. (shift-command-3 or -4.) You can do it from the command line like this:
screencapture filename.png (or 'filename.pdf' in 10.3)
For full screen caps, I ssh from one machine to another that is playing a DVD and run this script:
-----
#!/bin/sh
screencapture `date "+%s"`.pdf
osascript

The free (and Universal) InstantShot! program does nearly all of these things:
http://projects.digitalwaters.net/index.php?q=instantshot

I always thought this was a crazy restriction. No doubt the MPAA or someone forced it, but as a former teacher (of video production and design), it was a real bummer.

20 bucks! how now brown cow

The VideoLAN player (http://www.videolan.org/) is free (both as in beer and as in speech), and will allow you to take full screen snapshots while playing DVD's.