Apple has changed the above mentioned statement on the TOS-R page;
it no longer says that the episodes will become available “every week”
(they’ve removed the words “every week”). :/

1) The clipboard is not a folder. It is a temporary storage mechanism in memory that Windows uses when you do things like cut, copy and paste. It is available to all Windows programs.
2) Window Focus – Whatever program Window that is in front of all others is considered to have the “focus”. Only one window can have the focus at a time.

Also anytime you see the 3 tool buttons for cut, copy & paste (scissors, double document, clipboard) you are using the clipboard.

The print screen process that was described copies the image of the iTunes window when it has the focus to the clipboard so it can be pasted somewhere else, like into the windows paint program.

Open up both the iTunes program and the paint program. Just in case you’ve never played with paint, you can find it by going to the start button and selecting All Programs. Look in the Accessories group and you’ll see Paint. It’s been there since Windows was 1st released back in the mid 80s, albeit in a different location.

Once you have both programs open, go to your iTunes program and run the show up to the point you’d like to capture the image and pause the playback. Make sure it has the focus by single clicking on the Window’s Title bar at the top.

With iTunes as the Window with the focus, press and hold the Alt key and then the print screen key. After you pressed the print screen key you can let co of both keys. The image of the iTunes window will now be stored in the windows clipboard and is ready for you to paste somewhere.

Switch over to the paint program. If the button on the toolbar that looks like a clipboard is visible, then press it and the iTunes image will be pasted into paint. You can then save the image just as you would any other files.

As the original poster said, while it is in paint you can crop off the iTunes window title bar and frame boards. Please refer to the paint program’s help for more information about image cropping.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions about any of this if you are unsure and still want to be able to play with this.

Enjoy~

Have we done something to offend? ;)

Even though I swore I’d never do iTunes because of the ongoing DRM issues, TOS-R full length episodes for $2 a pop was too much for me to pass up so I signed up last night and downloaded Corbomite Maneuver. My experience has been a mixed bag so I thought I’d drop by here and share it with you and hopefully one of you guys will have some helpful advice regarding the issues I’m having.

Before I get into the issues, here is the good part of my experience and some answers to some of your questions:
Download Time: I have a pretty hot connection to the internet as I’m an independent software developer and need the bandwidth so it took about 13 minutes to download. Perfectly acceptable. Your mileage will vary. The file size for this episode is 585MB. If you download CD ISO images you’ll know what to expect.
Picture Quality: Even though the rez is standard VGA (640×480) it looks pretty good – especially compared to the SD cable feed I get here in the Seattle area from CW11. It is also very nice to be free of all the edits, station branding and the running ad overlays in the lower part of the screen.
Full Length: Yes and the new SFX are all there through the whole show. Very nice.
Audio: The sound is crisp and comparable to the DVDs however I think it is only a stereo mix and not the 5.1 mix on the DVDs – I may be wrong here so if someone knows for sure please confirm.

Now for the bad.
All my issues with this experience have to do with the iTunes application performance and not the TOS-R episode I downloaded.
Performance: This is the big problem. The video playback on the 2 systems I would want to play these on the most is unacceptably bad. The sounds plays flawlessly but the video has terrible trouble keeping going smoothly. The main system I want to be able to watch these on is Windows Vista Ultimate based PC with an overall experience rating of 3.5. It has a 3GHz Intel Celeron with 1.5GB of PC3100 DDR SDRAM and a front side bus speed of 800MHz. The hard drive is more than adequate as it is a 200GB 7200RPM drive and can be accessed very quickly. It actually has the best experience rating in the breakdown of 5.3. The sound in an Audigy 2. The graphics card is an ATI Radeon based 8X AGP card – most likely the culprit. The monitor is 20.1 widescreen LCD. This is by no means a “sluffer PC” as I use it regularly to mix 16 track audio and DVD quality video editing never mind the “day job” task it performs as my development workstation. It runs the Vista Aero glass presentation system perfectly and DVD playback is outstanding. It even plays high quality Quicktime files perfectly so why the hell can’t iTunes play with acceptable performance? Yes it is the latest version with the “fix” for Vista. My other system I want to watch these on is Windows XP MCE 2005 based but it is even worse but I expected that as the PC is not nearly as powerful as my studio PC. Even so, it plays DVDs and other digital media flawlessly which up till last night was always my un-official benchmark of minimum performance standards. The really troubling thing here is that my windows Vista laptop with lesser specs and a Vista experience rating of 3.1 plays the episode perfectly. I guess that’s OK for when I travel but for regular viewing it is unacceptable.

The other issue I have, and it relates to performance in that I have to search for a system that this crap works well on is DRM. Not much anyone can do there as this is an ongoing industry battle for control of their IP but it has been a hassle. iTunes only allows you to activate and use your downloaded programs on up to 5 PCs. For most folks that may be just fine but I have an army of PCs performing all sorts of home entertainment tasks and currently have a need to be able to play my content on 7 different systems. Since the 2 best ones I have won’t work, I have little hope of having it work on the other 4 except my laptop.

Part of me says this is all part of the ongoing Apple vs. Microsoft corporate conspiracy and that Apple has made their app work like crap on Vista intentionally and or Microsoft has made Vista treat iTunes badly but there is my old Dell that is running Vista fine and plays the episode perfectly so it is more likely my other favorite company to hate and that’s ATI. Given all the trouble I and others have had just getting their cards to work correctly and how much trouble they tend to be over even 1 OS update makes them the top runner.

OK, there you go. Hopefully one of you may have some advice. Perhaps this was helpful to someone else or it was entertaining in some way. All I ask though is to keep the Apple vs. Microsoft rant out of any replies. Thanks in advance.