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Why can't we screenshot frames from DRM-protected video on Apple devices?
- dTal 2y agoBecause 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 :)
- bigyabai 2y agoYup, case closed. If enough people cared about this then they wouldn't buy iPhones anymore. The market is speaking, and Apple is listening with rapt attention.
- walterbell 2y agoApple devices will happily play non-DRM content.
- bobobobo2 2y agoAre we at the point where we see this nakedly bad-faith argument for what it really is yet?
- bigyabai 2y agoHas the DOJ mandated that I'm wrong yet? Because if not, then no, Apple has every imperative to do as they please because the iPhone is evidently not a monopoly. We had a loooooong time to bury this argument in the ground. I think the iPhone is a monopoly, but until the DOJ agrees it's all a bunch of hot air. Truly, their stance is that you should buy a different phone if you disagree. FOMO proprietors like Apple delight in that answer, Hacker News acts like it's pulling teeth.
- what 2y agoThe reality is nobody cares. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to take a screenshot of a movie and I’m sure most people haven’t either.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoYou can’t extrapolate your needs to everyone’s needs. I’ve never needed to use a wheelchair for mobility, most people haven’t. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider the use case. What if you need to use a screen reader or magnifier for the text at the beginning of star wars. You would be pretty pissed if it was blocked by DRM. Hopefully pissed enough to sue under the ADA.
- what 2y agoThis is kind of a silly argument. You’re not going to stop your movie to take a screenshot so you can magnify the text or run some TTS on it. If you want movies to be “accessible”, you should argue for that. Being able to screenshot a movie doesn’t help make them accessible in the first place.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoI stop my movies all the time to read letters or text that passed by too quick to be see. I don’t know why someone vision disabled would not do that. They don’t have to be taking a screenshot, just using software that uses a screenshot api, like a screen magnifier or reader for example. The thing about accessibility is that you frequently don’t know or can’t anticipate how the built environment (including software) will be used by the disabled. Again, do not extrapolate your use case or experience to all users. Maybe I’m a college student that wants to take a screen grab for purposes covered under fair use. Maybe I’m a customer that needs to show a picture defect to customer support. Maybe there’s a use case that I haven’t thought of yet. The point is that disallowing screen shots prevents a lot of behaviors that are good for this world.
- what 2y ago
- kingo55 2y agoI would assume Linux wouldn't implement this but has this been verified somewhere? It's my understanding this limits the quality of content streamers permit to run on Linux: https://linuxcommunity.io/t/drm-the-final-barrier-to-linux-desktop-adoption/3760 https://linuxcommunity.io/t/drm-the-final-barrier-to-linux-d...
- 827a 2y agoI can confirm that screenshots are totally fine on Apple TV+ on Firefox + Pop OS. I don't know what the quality is, but it looks at least 1080p and as great as I would ever want to my eyes.
- 1123581321 2y agoIs it Wayland with capture enabled? That sounds like a fortuitous bug.
- Mindwipe 2y agoApple TV is limited to 720p on Linux.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gruez 2y agoYour suggestion for not being able to screenshot movies is to install linux, which doesn't support DRM (or does, but only at the lowest qualities)? Sounds like a pyrrhic victory to me.
- dTal 2y agoI would suggest that giving up control of your entire computer to get a few more pixels on some crappy (paid!) streaming service is the Pyrrhic victory. If everyone refused this Faustian bargain, then the services would be forced to adapt. In the meantime, your jar gets another penny every time you watch a movie. When it's full, find yourself a torrent client and spend the jar on whatever you want - they're free :)
- gruez 2y ago>I would suggest that giving up control of your entire computer to get a few more pixels on some crappy (paid!) streaming service is the Pyrrhic victory. This is going to inevitably turn into a mac/windows vs linux flamewar, so I'm going to acknowledge this but refuse to continue the discussion. >If everyone refused this Faustian bargain, then the services would be forced to adapt. Like getting people to use dedicated set-top boxes, like with cable TV? Amazon's fire stick is basically that. Moreover I think you're overestimating how much people care about "freedom to tinker" or whatever. They just want their shit to work. >When the jar fills up, find yourself a torrent client and spend the jar on whatever you want - it's free :) It's only "free" if you value your time at $0/hr.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rblatz 2y agoAlso I doubt the jar ever fills up, not many people in this thread seemed to be aware of this limitation until reading this post.
- realusername 2y ago> It's only "free" if you value your time at $0/hr. Checking the OS version, browser version, HDMI cable reference and screen reference to pray that the DRM works isn't really easy nor instantaneous either. I'd say it's even more annoying than torrenting
- hedora 2y agoI’ve had decent luck installing linux in a vm on a mac, then screen sharing the video the vm is playing. In fairness to apple, linux apparently runs fine on arm macbooks.
- mass_and_energy 2y agoIn fairness to Apple? Did they port it? I think you mean "in fairness to the maintainers"
- hedora 2y agoThey didn’t lock it down. It’s a bit unfair to say you don’t own your mac hardware. (vs. iPhone, iOS, or even Android, where even the things with unlocked bootloaders can’t run non-android-derived operating systems).
- bobobobo2 2y agoGood look convincing the employees of these companies, who seem to be a majority of the commenters on this post.
- ankurdhama 2y agoMore accurate statement would be that you don't own the content that streaming services provide. Apple (or for that matter any platform company) will have to implement DRM if they want their users to be able to watch such content. If you are against DRM then don't buy the subscriptions of such streaming services.
- jsheard 2y ago> 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.
- ack_complete 2y agoIt's simple to enable on Windows, any surface with DXGI_SWAP_CHAIN_FLAG_DISPLAY_ONLY set will get excluded from screen capture APIs. No DRM is required. DRM isn't always the reason for video not being capturable, though. Efficiency optimizations can also get in the way, such as hardware video overlays. Back when overlays were first introduced, attempting to capture the screen would often omit the video because it would only capture the chroma key in the primary surface. Even today, the DWM has to undo multi-plane optimizations and specifically composite the screen when screen capture is requested.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoDoesn'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.
- walterbell 2y agoIf the user requests a screenshot, the CPU can request a frame from the GPU.
- bigyabai 2y agoDigital Rights Management != Direct Rendering Manager
- mjg59 2y agoVideo RAM is accessible to the OS, if you render into it it can be read back. In this case it's deliberately rendered into a separate protected area of RAM the OS can't read, and composited at scanout time.
- krackers 2y agoCompositing is done by the OS though (WindowServer in case of mac). Ever since OSX stopped allowing direct framebuffer access I think the only way to read (e.g. for screenshots) windows of other processes' is by asking WindowServer to do it for you, so I'm guessing that's how this protection is implemented. WindowServer ultimately still needs to get access to the framebuffer somehow though, so there must be some private API somewhere to bridge kernel and userspace part. I suspect if you could bypass SIP or just write a kext to access video memory directly then it'd be possible to defeat this protection.
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- sxp 2y ago> 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 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.
- perching_aix 2y agoThis even extends to screensharing on Teams. If I recall correctly, DRM protected content is completely black even when using Chrome.
- jandrese 2y agoYep, it's super annoying to pull up a movie on your machine and want to cast it over to the TV to watch and only getting a black screen because you didn't do the DRM dance correctly.
- giancarlostoro 2y agoPssst disable hardware acceleration.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Mindwipe 2y agoWhich, reasonably, significantly reduces your resolution.
- blibble 2y agothis is just the standard way the video overlay works
- walterbell 2y ago> 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.
- kevincox 2y ago> Censorship of free advertising is against the economic interest of rightsholders This was literally the first time I saw this "feature". I was watching something on Netflix and wanted to share a screenshot with someone. I realized that it didn't work. Ok, I guess you don't get my top-quality word-of-mouth marketing and to allow paying subscribers to enhance their enjoyment by chatting about the show. It is just a lose-lose scenario.
- benoau 2y ago> Censorship of free advertising is against the economic interest of rightsholders. Is it though? In the old days they needed people to recommend you see a movie or listen to a song or whatever today it's hyper-personalized algorithms and if that's not enough almost every major tech company sells targeted advertising to show your <thing> ahead of the rest.
- walterbell 2y agoPersonal recs from trusted people outweigh paid ads. Studios get free promotion that outperforms algorithmic placement. Facebook and Google may want more advertising, but that's not Apple's core business. TikTok has BookTok, FilmTok and MovieTok communities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BookTok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BookTok > #BookTok had been viewed over 200 billion times on TikTok with about 60 billion videos.. There are many articles that discuss how BookTok has changed reading for younger people and impacted the publishing landscape.. Another popular aspect of the community culture in BookTok is the open discussion and the idea that users are reading the books together
- bilalq 2y agoThis same issue prevents AirPlay from showing DRM video content on TVs. It's incredibly frustrating since Samsung TVs don't support Chromecasting.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sureIy 2y agoThat's a feature. You paid to get the video on the small screen, so you will watch it there. Netflix has a mobile-only plan in emerging markets that is cheaper than the "SD" plan. That's DRM for ya
- Marsymars 2y agoIt's so much fun when AirPlay doesn't work so I have to go dig out my Chromebook and an HDMI cable to connect directly to my TV.
- hapticmonkey 2y agoThe 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.
- t0mas88 2y agoThis irony already existed in the good old DVD age. If you bought one legally you had to sit through several unskippable videos, usually also one about piracy, before the movie starts. If you had pirated that same movie would play immediately, so the user experience was better.
- kyriakos 2y agonot even hours later in most cases. these anti-theft measures will block the random individual who wants to make a clip out of a movie but won't stop anyone actively pirating.
- xp84 2y agoIt's wild to me that these guys still try this hard with DRM given that obvious reality. Like, I get that streaming services aren't just shipping an MP4 file that you can right-click and hit Save As. But the blacking out the video when I take a screenshot on a freaking iPhone... what is being prevented here? Someone is going to make a copy of a movie by taking 3,000,000 screenshots and stitching them all together?
- crazygringo 2y ago> 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.
- p0w3n3d 2y agoThat's not an argument. There is no law that prevents me from taking screenshots therefore I should be able to do it
- crazygringo 2y agoDid you see where I started with "I'm not defending Apple here"? I'm just pointing out that one of Gruber's points doesn't really hold water.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kuschku 2y agoDRM isn't about release groups, and it never was. Actual pirates have a million different methods to capture video. DRM is a panic reaction to VHS, designed to making copying so inconvenient that casual users won't bother anymore.
- bob1029 2y agoI look at the raw amount of information as a form of deterrent in some cases. Getting a Blu-ray rip to a point where the average Pirate Bay user would be willing to wait for the download takes quite a bit of transcoding work. Not many are interested in maintaining 1:1 50 gigabyte source copies of every film out there.
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- busymom0 2y agoA 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 2y agoIt 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 2y agoIf I were Apple, I'd leverage this in content licensing negotiations.
- recursive 2y agoI'm curious how you imagine this came to be. What a strange coincidence! Oh well maybe we can use it to get better deals. What luck!
- mjg59 2y agoI wrote about some of this earlier this year: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70954.html?thread=2203178 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")
- throwaway48476 2y agoMaking the world worse one DRM at a time.
- tabony 2y agoI 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.
- mjg59 2y agoThere's nothing stopping hardware accelerated decode being in the same framebuffer as everything else, the only reason for this is DRM - you get just the same acceleration with VLC, but can still screenshot. The XP era is when we depended on fixed-function hardware overlays to scale video and handle yuv translation, and yes in that case you'd just get a magenta or blue background instead of the video. That era sucked, and hardware got better since then.
- ack_complete 2y agoThose never went away, they're just called multiplane overlay (MPO) now and are better integrated into the system. The Windows 10/11 DWM automatically migrates swap chains in and out of independently flipped overlays to save power, and can recomposite them when screen capture is requested.
- mastax 2y agoFrom 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 2y agoAt this point I just torrent again, it's not worth the hassle trying to pay for content
- xp84 2y agoHear, hear. I was also pleasantly surprised how fast a pirated movie appears on a gigabit connection. Last time I had used BitTorrent it was on like 200Mbps.
- AraceliHarker 2y agoOn 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.
- rgovostes 2y agoApple’s GIF search feature in Messages (#images, like Giphy) is almost entirely content from TV shows and movies. It seems hypocritical for Apple to promote this as a way to express yourself, while prohibiting users from making such content themselves on Apple devices.
- hugs 2y agoi created a tool to get around this. (called "valet vision".) of course, it involves using a raspberry pi and a camera pointed at the phone's screen. as they say, life (and automation engineers) finds a way...
- vednig 2y agoThen I think, you should still give a warning to users https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court-breaking-drm-for-a-fair-use-is-legal/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court...
- Suppafly 2y agoI get that DRM is important for content providers but it really sucks to not be able to grab individual frames for things like running them through google translate or google image search. There have been a few times I've wished to grab a frame for something like a meme, but mostly it's accessibility things being blocked for no real reason. They don't stop piracy, they just prevent people from doing things like translation.
- yalogin 2y agoPreventing screenshots takes resources. You need engineering,l time, the solution itself consumes system memory, needs additional code at run time and ultimately consumes more power on the devices. All of these apple doesn’t want to spend; so I would guess may be there were attempts to reconstruct movies using screenshots or may be it was asked of them?
- caseyy 2y agoIt’s probably due to some licensing verbiage because these DRM implementations do just about nothing good. Pirates still rip videos from these platforms somehow, but the usual customer can’t watch the 4K they paid for on most browsers. So, it must be an idiosyncrasy at some management/licensing level, not something that serves a functional purpose. And frankly, the “buy 4K, but we will serve you 1080p in most cases” sounds like a class action lawsuit in the making anyway. So, if anything, this DRM scheme will cost them more than just wasted engineer time.
- bitpush 2y agoNot supporting any party in this case, but this argument is weak. This is like saying "putting padlocks cost money. We have to make sure we research about locks, buy the right one, give right people the keys. It is easier to just .. keep the door unlocked" Every solution has its costs. The question is whether those costs outweight the benefits it seemingly brings. In this particular case, Apple has decided the DRM implementation costs outweight the benefits.
- manbitesdog 2y agoEarlier this year I bought a bunch of moon-shaped LED lamps that are controlled with an IR remote, and made an ambilight app for my computer that constantly screenshots the screen, finds the predominant color and sends a signal to change the color in all of them. Only to find that watching a TV show would just leave all black...
- diebeforei485 2y agoIt's also blacked out when screen sharing, but there is no way for other apps (eg. bank apps) to ask for the section of the app that contains the user's credit and debit card numbers to be blacked out when screen sharing.
- bsimpson 2y agoIt's nice to see Gruber writing about these things, because he has credibility amongst the Apple copium huffers. I feel like this is the kind of gripe that would be waved away as no big deal or "well actually…" if someone outside the Apple fandom made it.
- wkat4242 2y ago> This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but 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. Yeah what's the point? If anything it's yet another reason to just download pirated content. You can screenshot that just fine. You can save it where you want without expiring, play it on every device you want, you're not bothered by trailers or ads or have to use a specific player app or a device with a particular wildvine level or whatever. It doesn't constantly monitor what you watch and when. It's just so much better, and many of these restrictions are only for the benefit of the publisher. Doing that makes sense if users have nowhere else to go but now they're shooting themselves in the foot. Especially with the latest 'pay more or watch ads' fad with the streaming services, do they really expect piracy not to massively increase?
- lazycouchpotato 2y agoRecently ran into issues caused by Apple's DRM protection as well. I wanted to stream Crunchyroll on my TV from my iPad 9 via the Lightning to HDMI dongle. Apparently an iOS update 2 years ago broke that functionality for DRM content [1]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/04/ios-16-break-drm-content-hdmi/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/04/ios-16-break-drm-content-hdmi...
- robertlutece 2y agoRan into this the other day trying to screenshot something in the background of a music video playing through Spotify's desktop app. I opened youtube, took the screenshot from the video there, and wondered why the protection was necessary.
- rdtsc 2y ago> What I don’t understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video To claim that they did. That’s the quality of work you get when you’re forced to comply to get a certificate or pass a check or something of that nature.
- giorgioz 2y agoI'll do the devil's advocate: (not because I'm on Apple side, just to see all points of view). The florist in the article can still grab her phone and take a photo. I think the problem with not allowing single screenshots is that once you allow access to the video stream a software on the machine can sinply capture ALL frames and recreate a video out of it. Anyway, until there will be one not protected distribution channel the torrents source file will be collected there.
- handoflixue 2y agoDoes this actually do anything to stop torrents? You said yourself, you can trivially bypass the protection using 3rd party hardware like "recording on a cell phone." This doesn't seem like it does anything to reduce actual piracy, while severely harming the Fair Use right to take a quick screenshot for personal reference.
- joshstrange 2y agoThis is one of the more boneheaded moves of DRM IMHO. They are shooting themselves in the foot for no gain I can see and huge amount of downside. People are screenshotting (or even recording a 5sec clip) to _share your content_. These methods clearly have zero effect on piracy so all they do is make legitimate user’s lives more difficult. It _might_ make sense if every streaming platform had built-in tools to share a clip or a screenshot, but they don’t. It completely baffles me. I need to dust off my plans for a simple Plex gif-maker tool. A web-based tool I can load and is queued up to wherever I am in the show I’m watching with grabbers on a video timeline to select the start/end of the clip. Then export to mp4/gif, maybe simple subtitle support or text overlays.
- ongytenes 2y agoI noticed that I can no longer that a screenshot on my Samsung phone of Netflix. I used it to advertise a show to my friends. "You gotta watch this..." It’s just them shooting themselves in the foot.
- gloosx 2y ago>These DRM blackouts happen at such a low level that no high-level software — any sort of utility you might install — can route around them. Well, since physically you still own your device you can send direct assembly instructions to your processing units, or even just take HDMI signal, intercept and record it fully. Technically if one bothers to reverse engineer the instructions browsers send, they can be studied and reversed. There are tools for that, as well as high-level languages which make it possible to execute low-level assembly code.
- mozball 2y agoApparently the same DRM is also enforced in the Apple Vision Pro as MrWhoseTheBoss discovered in his review. Except in that case, Apple's DRM pipeline extends all the way up to your eyeballs instead of your HDMI TV. That realization about what our dystopian future might hold for us seemed to hit him pretty hard : https://youtu.be/5MhRZp2uunc?feature=shared&t=861 https://youtu.be/5MhRZp2uunc?feature=shared&t=861
- bobdvb 2y agoThere's little difference between enabling a single screen shot and allowing screen recording. The rights owners require blocking of screen recording, so all screen capture gets blocked as a result.