I have tried my usual CapturezePro and Printscreen + paste but all I every get is a black rectangle when pasted into a blank Photoshop image. I am playing the DVD in Windows media player and have tried pausing the player before the capture attempt.
That is correct.
You can not capture a frame from your DVD using Windows Media Player because Microsoft, in an attempt to corner the market on digital media distribution and add a few more billion dollars to its net worth, is playing the game of "suck up to the Motion Picture Association of America."
You don’t know it, but you have stepped right into the middle of an ugly political fight that is currently raging in the courts, the legislative offices, and the corporations in the United States. In fact, there are people in the Motion Picture Association of America who say you do not exist.
Here’s a bit of background:
DVD movies are stored on the disc in an encrypted form. The reason DVDs are encrypted is that the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, is afraid of wholesale copying of Hollywood movies.
The MPAA and another association, the RIAA 9Recording Industry Association of America), spent tens of millions of dollars to pass a law in the United States called the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act," or DMCA. Under the DMCA, it is a Federal crime for any person to write a software program that can take screen shots, samples, or any other content from any protected digital recording, including a DVD. It is also a Federal crime to own, distribute, talk about, or traffic in any software program that can do that.
Now, many people, including an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation (but EXCLUDING Microsoft) argued against this law in court. They argued, among other things, that the law makes it a crime to copy pieces of a recording that are protected by "fair use," and the law ALSO makes it a crime to write software that will allow somebody who OWNS a recording, like for example someone who makes his own DVD from his own videotape, to use his own recording however he wants.
The MPAA and the courts said nobody would ever do such a thing–all the people who are trying to take screen captures from DVDs are not the owners, but are pirates trying to steal Hollywood’s money.
Microsoft is currently investing a great deal of time and money attempting to get Hollywood and recording studios to use Microsoft programs to distribute their movies and records online. In order to do that, Microsoft is eager to show that they are willing to make those records and movies un-copyable. As a result, Microsoft is pushing a DMCA-friendly attitude, and is pushing "digital rights management"–essentially, an encryption technique which makes it impossible to copy, say, a sound or movie file from one computer to another.
If Microsoft’s billions and Hollywood’s billions mean that you don’t get to do screen captures of your home movies, well, guess what? You’re screwed. Microsoft’s media player is carefully and specifically designed to stop you from taking screen captures from any DVD for any reason. Even if you own the DVD. Even if you made it yourself.
There is a program that will do what you want. It’s called PowerDVD; you can find it online by doing a Google search. PowerDVD is technically not legal to import into the United States, as it violates one of the provisions of the DMCA, but it has not yet appeared on the MPAA’s radar (and it’s quite popular here in the States). You should have no problem etting it into the UK, even though the UK is in the process of adopting laws that are almost word-for-word copies of the American DMCA.
So now you know.
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