Due to the nature of the way Zoomed Video is handled on the Mac and a particular technology called chromakey, that we simply won't get into, this article will quickly show you how to get DVDs to play as your desktop background, with icons, windows, and all the rest of your Mac OS right on top. You must have a DVD-capable PowerMac desktop or PowerBook G3 Series with DVD for the trick to work. Mac OS 8.5.x is the only system software version this is confirmed to work for, but you can try it for 8.x.

Step 1

Set your DVD player to "full screen mode" and take a screenshot. To take a screenshot, hit the key combination Shift-Apple Key-3. You'll hear a cute picture noise and a PICT file will be saved in the root level of your harddrive, most likely named "Picture 1." When you take the screenshot be sure to hide your cursor in either of the bottom corners of your screen, so as to not have the cursor in the screenshot.

Step 2

Open your Appearance control panel (or your Desktop Picture control panel if you're trying this with 8.x) and select the screenshot you took as your desktop picture. You may want to move it from the root level of your harddrive and rename it to avoid any confusion.

Step 3

Hide the DVD Player software. It's that easy. Now full motion DVD video should be playing as your desktop background. Note that if you experience any brown areas of your screen, that's due to the DVD being formatted in "Widescreen" or "Letterbox" fomat, or you did not properly select "Full Screen Mode" when playing the DVD to start at the beginning.

Feedback

Here are some reader comments on the success of the trick, from when it was first noted on our main news page:

Tried your trick of playing a DVD as your desktop background. Works as advertised!! As expected the movie jumps when I start apps or navigate around my hard drive, but the movie picks up and keeps going. Pretty cool stuff! Now to show the PC folks at work...

I got the movie to play on my desktop but it won't fill the screen and there's an ugly brown color in the unfilled background. BTW, I'm using Apple DVD player 1.2(from OS 8.6b9) on my powerbook G3 series. Would that make a difference? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Great tip by the way!

Thanks for reading, please send some feedback on your success with the trick. Also, visit our main news page today for the latest PowerBook news and as always, don't forget to bookmark!

Written/Edited/Published by Doug B. Landry
Logo by Jon Iverson
Apple, Mac, Macintosh, Mac OS,The Apple Store, and Powerbook are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
©1998 Doug B. Landry. All rights reserved. All or part may not be reproduced or distributed without prior consent.
Coded on a Apple Macintosh Powerbook G3 Series from Baton Rouge, LA