Arrghh, DVD player froze on me in fullscreen.

My superdrive is failing on my macbook. Tonight I had a whole bunch of apps open and I decided to pop in a DVD and then the DVD player app froze on me in fullscreen with choppy video. So I had to hold down power button to turn off the mac. I am wondering if it would have been possible to force quit the application even if the screen is pure black? I tried pressing eject but that wouldn't work, and I also tried pressing option command esc, but it was no use to me since I couldn't see the dialog box to pick which app to quit. After I did some research and I found I could have maybe pressed control command eject to close all apps and restart instead of holding down the power button to turn off the mac (does this hurt anything when you turn of your mac this way?).

You could have tried Command+Q which is a universal quit hotkey. I don't believe it would be your superdrive failing, more like a software problem.

While holding the power button to turn off your mac is not recommended it will not really "hurt" anything per say, you would just lose anything that wasn't saved.

As for control command eject it will not hurt anything, it is simply a hotkey for initiating a restart.