Why Can’t We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?

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 Tool — a utility exclusive to Microsoft Windows, users are free to screen grab content from all streaming platforms. This seems like a pointed oversight, a choice on the part of streamers to exclude Mac users (though they make up a tiny fraction of the market) because of their assumed cultural class. This assumption isn’t unreasonable. Out of everyone interviewed for this article, only one of them was a PC user.

Deligter’s essay has been sitting in my long (and ever-growing) list of things to link to ever since she published it back in 2023. I referenced it in my post earlier today re: Matthew Green’s entreaty to Apple to add “disappearing messages” to iMessage, and re-reading it made me annoyed enough to finally write about it.

I’m not entirely sure what the technical answer to this is, but on MacOS, it seemingly involves the GPU and video decoding hardware. 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. 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. Or perhaps rather than less sophisticated, it’s more accurate to say less integrated. These DRM blackouts on Apple devices (you can’t capture screenshots from DRM video on iPhones or iPads either) are enabled through the deep integration between the OS and the hardware, thus enabling the blackouts to be imposed at the hardware level. And I don’t think the streaming services opt into this screenshot prohibition other than by “protecting” their video with DRM in the first place. If a video is DRM-protected, you can’t screenshot it; if it’s not, you can.

On the Mac, it used to be the case that DRM video was blacked-out from screen capture in Safari, but not in Chrome (or the dozens of various Chromium-derived browsers). But at some point a few years back, you stopped being able to capture screenshots from DRM videos in Chrome, too — by default. But in Chrome’s Settings page, under System, if you disable “Use graphics acceleration when available” and relaunch Chrome, boom, you can screenshot everything in a Chrome window, including DRM video. You can go to the magic URL chrome://gpu/ before and after toggling this setting to see a full report on the differences — as you’d expect, it turns off all hardware acceleration for video encoding/decoding, compositing, and more. You wouldn’t want to browse like this all the time (certainly not on battery power), but it’s a great trick to know for capturing stills from videos.

What I don’t understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video (which is all video on iOS platforms — there is no workaround like using Chrome with hardware acceleration disabled on iPhone or iPad). 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. And it’s not like this “feature” in MacOS and iOS has put an end to bootlegging DRM-protected video content. 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.