I did a test this morning to check out how well the video recording gear we have would work for recording a presentation tomorrow. The gear works great – it records directly to DVD so I can just walk away with a nice shiny disk after the presentation is over.
But that’s not what this post is about. This DVD, that I made, containing no DRM and no copyright, triggers the evil DRM software that’s baked into the operating system that I use. I had the DVD program running in the background, and went to take a screenshot of something else – and was rewarded with a warning dialog:
“Screen grabs are unavailable during DVD playback. Please quit DVD Player first.”
Great. I wasn’t trying to take a screengrab of a DVD. Of MY DVD. It was paused, behind a bunch of windows. I was trying to grab a portion of a browser window. But, irony of ironies, I was able to capture this:
That’s me in the DVD. But because the MPAA makes software companies bend over to protect their content by baking DRM into the apps that ship with my computer, I’m prevented from doing legitimate things with my own content. Thankfully, there are ways around it (Jing was more than happy to capture a screenshot – I’m sure the MPAA attack dogs will be closing that hole ASAP).
DRM is nothing but a pain in the ass. It doesn’t stop anyone from copying anything if they really want to, but it does get in the way of legitimate use of content. I’m not pissed at Apple for putting this screengrab block in the OS – I’m quite sure they did it to prevent having endless series of lawsuits by the MPAA legal beagles, and/or to abide by some licensing terms.
The MPAA can bite me, though. They have no right to compel anyone to cripple the programs I use to interact with the content I create.
Have you tried to use VLC to do your DVD screen grabs?
I haven’t – but the point wasn’t taking a screengrab of the DVD, it was the evil attempt by the MPAA to try to control what I can do with my own content. I wasn’t even trying to take a screengrab of a DVD – it just happened to be open (and hidden) in the background – I was originally just trying to take a screengrab of a small portion of a browser window. When DVD Player complained when I tried to do that, I decided the natural reaction would be to take a screengrab of the DVD, though 🙂
The actual reason might not be DRM-related at all. Lots of playback software takes advantage of hardware acceleration to send video through a separate pathway that bypasses the normal graphics driver, and can’t be captured by normal screenshot methods. To allow screenshots, applications either need to forgo hardware acceleration or include extra code specifically for capturing images from memory. More info:
http://www.allformp3.com/dvd-faqs/44.htm
@matt – I don’t buy that. Jing was able to capture a screengrab of the DVD Player app just fine. It’s not hardware acceleration getting in the way, it’s the software deciding to turn off a core feature of the OS.
I can’t imagine a group of Apple software engineers sat around a whiteboard one day, brainstorming ideas for the next version of the DVD Player application. One of them blurts out “I’ve got it! what would make the whole thing SO MUCH BETTER would be if there’s a DVD playing, the screengrab feature should be disabled. Wouldn’t that be great? Yeah! Let’s add that. I’ll start coding that right away.”
For some reason, I’m guessing it was probably more like “Legal says we need to kill screengrabs if there’s a DVD playing. Is that even possible? I mean, screengrabs are part of the core OS. Dammit. Tony? Call someone from the Core OS team. Is there a way to turn this off? Dammit. What a fracking waste of time. I’d be coding the new UI, but now I have to backburner that to figure out a way to hack into the core API calls to kill screengrabs.”
> a way to hack into the core API calls to kill screengrabs.”
At any rate said core API is still there, it’s just the application that’s been ‘hacked’ (internally, as it were.)
You can recreate this function with a one line script:
http://bit.ly/DVDscreengrab