If you’ve purchased a video from the iTunes Music Store you’re aware that purchased videos differ from audio tracks in one very important regard: You can’t burn them to disc. Of course this limits you to viewing said videos on your computer, an iPod, or a television connected to either of these devices—DVD player viewing is out. Unless…
…you understand that anything that travels down wires can be intercepted and captured. And, ultimately, this is digital rights management’s dirty little secret.
Until Apple and its video providers offer a more elegant solution for making iTunes videos as portable as the audio tracks sold by Apple, you have to rely on one of a couple of methods for capturing purchased videos.
The first is to attach video and audio cables to your computer or 5G iPod, route those cables into a recording device—a camcorder, VCR, or computer video capture card—hit Record on the recording device and play on the computer or iPod, and grab the content you want. Recapture the resulting video to your computer in an unprotected format, and do what you will with it (other than give it to others, which is a violation of copyright law and a generally evil thing to do).
Alternatively Mac users can use Ambrosia Software’s $69 Snapz Pro X and Windows folk can use any of a number of screen capture utilities to capture the audio and video playing on their computer screens.
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