I'm thinking about buying the first season of the television show Southland with the ultimate goal of making captures. It's available in HD through amazon digital services. Does anybody know if by buying it directly online I'd be able to play it with VLC or another type of player and make captures? I'm not sure how it goes with HD so that's why I'm asking here. Thanks.

If it's an HD video file that you pay for it's pretty much guaranteed to have some sort of DRM (I think Amazon uses Micrsoft's Windows Media DRM) and you wont be able to play in with VLC.

Thanks for the reply IRT. So there's basically no way for me to be able to make captures from it?

Maybe if you turn off all your video hardware acceleration (get it to stop displaying to an overlay) you might be able to do a normal capture to clipboard w/ PrintScreen or some screen capture software? Just an idea.

Have you had experiences with doing this?

It is not hard to do, and it will probably work (though that I am not sure at 100%), but it is painful for making captures.
And it is also possible that without hardware acceleration your PC will not be able to play the HD video propetly, as the CPU will have to do most of the work which is usually done by the video card.

I suppose it would just be more worth my while then to buy the DVD set.

DVD is easiest indeed.

I just bought the set of four Die Hard movies on blu-ray... I still haven't found how to play that on my PC When using the player provided with the PC, I do not have sound, and MPC-HC can't read it because of the encryption. I could install 'AnyDVD HD' which should allow me to play the disc in MPC-HC but having to buy that program 70€ just for that is annoying (though that I guess I do not have other choice if I want to play blu-ray and be able to make captures).
I should have downloaded a HD mkv file as usual, it would have been easier

Isn't PowerDVD 9 compatible with blu-ray?

Possible but I prefer to buy AnyDVDHD and play the disc with MPCHC then, rather than buying PowerDVD.

Is that what you've used for the HD movies you've already added?

All previous HD movies were illegal downloads so no protection, I was just using MPCHC to play them like I do for DVDs and divx files.

I see...I was thinking of purchasing the cheap version of PowerDVD 9 (it costs about $50), especially since I've only had good experiences with PowerDVD in the past. But it seems like a bit much...I could be using that money for more important things instead.

I recently purchased a new laptop with Windows 7 and a Blu-ray drive and I'm trying to figure out how to make screen captures. The program that my computer uses is Corel WinDVD. (Windows Media does not support BD) It has a capture feature but it does not work when I click on it. I have tried using printscreen, but that didn't work either. How can I turn off the video hardware acceleration like owlman said?

Isn't there an option for that somewhere in the program's preferences?

I tried changing some of the options in the program's preferences. Is there a way that I can change the video overlay on my computer?

I think you can modify acceleration in the display settings in your Windows Control Panel.

^ Yeah, the option is there but mine is unclickable/locked. I looked for answers online and I found that downloading Windows Media Classic will work. I haven't figured out how to use its capture feature, but I can capture very good HD images using printscreen. Better than nothing.

Nice. I didn't know Media Player Classic supported Blu-Ray.

In MPC-HC you can do captures through an item of the File menu, or assign a shortcut to it (e.g. I assigned the "P" key)
But so you say that you can read the blu-ray with MPC-HC directly? It was a non-protected disc then I guess Since for blu-ray that I bought I had to use AnyDVDHD to be able to read them with MPC-HC due to the protection.