Saturday, 1 March 2025
Nora Deligter, writing for Screen Slate in June 2023, “Elegy for the Screenshot”:
About five years ago, Catherine Pearson started taking screenshots
of every bouquet featured on The Nanny (1993–1999), the
six-season CBS sitcom that was then streaming on Netflix. She was
just becoming a florist, and she found the arrangements — ornate,
colorful, and distinctly tropical — inspirational. She now keeps
them in a folder on her desktop, alongside screenshots of flower
arrangements featured on Poirot (1989–2013), the British
detective drama. A few months ago, however, Pearson suddenly found
that when her fingers danced instinctively toward Command-Shift-3,
she was greeted by a black box where her flowers used to be, a
censored version of what she had meant to capture.It was around this time when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO
Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet
embargo on the screenshot. At first, there were workarounds: users
could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by
downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But
gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became
more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a
screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not
on a Macintosh computer. […]For PC users, this story takes a different, and happier, turn.
With the use of Snipping To
16 Comments
dTal
Because you don't own the device, and the real device owner (Apple) is not working in your best interests. If you resent this kind of thing, put a penny in a jar every time software that you've paid for makes your life worse; when the jar is full, find a copy of Linux and install it. Spend the jar on whatever you want – it's free :)
jsheard
> I think Windows still offers easy screenshotting of frames from DRM video not because the streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do (which, when you think about it, would be a weird thing not to care about, given Windows’s market share), but because Windows uses a less sophisticated imaging pipeline.
That anti-screenshot mechanism does also exist on Windows, but it's only enforced by stronger forms of DRM like Widevine L1. Typically streaming services mandate L1 or equivalent to watch HD/4K streams, so you can't easily screenshot those, only the lower resolution versions with weaker protection. Workarounds like disabling hardware acceleration are really just disabling strong DRM support so you get served a weakly protected low res stream instead.
I guess Apple applies the same restrictions to all DRM protected content, even if the service only demands a weak form of DRM.
ChocolateGod
Doesn't macOS also use this for power savings, rather than only DRM? This is something that Linux is also starting to pick up, and is probably one of the biggest reasons for Apple Silicon Macs having superior battery life.
The GPU is the thing decoding the video stream and putting it directly on the display (via hardware planes). It doesn't need to send it back (aka copy) to the main CPU. Screenshots can't see what's there because the CPU has no knowledge of whats there.
Rather than the GPU decoding the video, sending it back to the CPU which then will send the frame back to the GPU as part of composition, and wasting power.
sxp
> I think Windows still offers easy screenshotting of frames from DRM video not because the streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do
This is incorrect. The DRM on Windows varies based on the browser. Trying playing Netflix in Edge vs Chrome and take screenshots. The video will be black on Edge but visible on Chrome. If you use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D on Edge or Chrome to bring up the stats or view their test videos at https://www.netflix.com/watch/80164785, you can see that Edge plays 4k HDR but Chrome only plays 1080p SDR. Netflix allows 1080p with weak DRM but requires strong DRM for 4k.
There are similar restrictions for mobile devices, VR headsets, etc. where the resolution is limited on certain devices and browsers because of their DRM configuration.
walterbell
> imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.
Legally, public screenshots accompanied by text/audio/video commentary are fair use. When shared on social media, reviews, or fan sites with influencer commentary, they are unpaid marketing for video creators.
Censorship of free advertising is against the economic interest of rightsholders. Is this checkbox compliance theatre, e.g. does everyone in the distribution chain mindlessly click a DRM button? Can Apple differentiate between DRM screen recording and DRM screenshots? Can Apple differentiate between 30-second promotional clips and longer recordings, or rate limit N captures per M wallclock time? Can rightsholders add metadata to enable screenshots on a per-title basis?
If one studio can demonstrate marketing success with authorized screen excerpts, other studios may follow.
bilalq
This same issue prevents AirPlay from showing DRM video content on TVs. It's incredibly frustrating since Samsung TVs don't support Chromecasting.
hapticmonkey
The irony here is that despite all these DRM efforts, piracy groups upload 4K HDR (or Dolby Vision) atmos mkv files within hours anyway.
Meanwhile watching these shows the legal way on unsupported DRM chain gives you 720p SDR with worse audio.
crazygringo
> No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time — and even if they tried, they’d be capturing only the images, not the sound.
I'm not defending Apple here, but — yes they definitely would? And then they'd get sound on a second pass at regular speed.
If pirates couldn't access the underlying Netflix etc. bitstream like they've figured out, they'd absolutely be reading the desktop video buffer, which is all a screenshot is.
busymom0
A friend of mine who was taking a few Udemy courses last year ran into this issue when he needed to take screenshots for important things he was learning in the course. Ended up working around it by disabling GPU acceleration in chrome.
freehorse
It is annoying but not that tragic. Browser built-in screenshotting works fine (I use firefox) as does OBS. Only the builtin macos screenshotting tool gives black frames, which again is annoying and should not be the case, but there are alternatives that are ok at least.
ilumanty
If I were Apple, I'd leverage this in content licensing negotiations.
mjg59
I wrote about some of this earlier this year: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70954.html?thread=2203178 – the short version is that it has nothing to do with screenshotting, screenshotting is just a victim of it. If you have decoded video content in video RAM a separate app can just read it back out and reencode it, stripping DRM for minimal loss in quality.
(In theory the hardware could provide a rate limited interface to allow copying it, letting you take one screenshot every few seconds or something, but that would create additional "risk")
tabony
I couldn’t screenshot non-DRM videos on Windows XP either.
It’s because the video is being rendered on a different framebuffer for performance reasons.
Helpful for DRM too.
mastax
From what I remember of the windows video apis there is a system for decoding DRM content where you need to use special types of buffers which can’t be mapped to the CPU. There’s special interfaces in MediaFoundation (decoding) DXGI (buffer/device interop) and Direct Composition.
Maybe there are holes or the browsers aren’t doing it properly or it only applies to the MS proprietary DRM.
nimish
At this point I just torrent again, it's not worth the hassle trying to pay for content
AraceliHarker
On Android, taking screenshots of things like Amazon Prime Video used to be possible, even on the same device, but at some point it became impossible.