When you use accelerated video, you have to move to grabbing the final framebuffer directly instead of the one that doesn't have the video composited on top of it. GPUs normally allow you to do this. Apple's GPU driver might not permit it at all. This is why disabling video acceleration in Chrome allowed you to screenshot videos played there. Apple is presumably always using GPU acceleration and may even be processing the DRM itself on the GPU.

This is abusive to the user and it prevents you from exercising your fair use rights, and it's also probably intentional. But Apple also didn't have to go out of their way to accomplish it. All they had to do was not go out of their way to enable you to exercise your rights, in the name of 1) simplicity and 2) protection of the interests of others who are not you.

As TFS says, Microsoft does problematic things around DRM as well, and will only continue to ratchet that up over time. If you want to get away from this kind of crap, you have only FOSS options to choose from.

Remember how back in the day if you transferred your music to an iPod there was no functionality built into iTunes to send the music files back to your computer? That ended up biting some people in the ass when they mistakenly believed the iPod doubled as a backup for their music collection. Yeah, I know third party software eventually made it possible, but we're talking about people who bought a device expecting everything to "just work."

Of course, when you factor in that Apple basically has to stay in the good graces of the RIAA and MPAA lest the terms of their licensing deals be altered (think Darth Vader style), it's not surprising that they've taken a heavy-handed approach to what you're allowed to do with DRMed content.

Ironically, the protection behind all this content has been quite broken for some time. Pick up a generic HDMI splitter and one of the various cheap HDMI capture cards capable of 1080p60 capture and you can literally record whatever you want. Most people don't bother with this method though, because the actual scene group pirates have tools for directly ripping streams, and then it's up for grabs as a torrent. Being able to record from a streaming service can still be useful, if for example, for some strange reason you're the only person who wants a copy of an extremely unpopular Disney movie and Disney Plus is the only service that has it in HD.

Woah, slow down here. How do I get the webcam of my macbook to even point at the screen for a single device screenshot?

For whatever reason, theyâ(TM)ve also done this if youâ(TM)re using DisplayLink, the thing that gives you extra monitors through your cheap usb docking station or usb monitor. Content wonâ(TM)t display on any screen (even the internal one) if you have any DisplayLink screens active. And DRM even shows up in places like Udemy, so if you want to watch your âoecourseâ at work (where all desks have those cheap DisplayLink docking stations), the only way to make it work is to turn off ch

ctrl+C>(open photoshop/paint/whatever)>ctrl+V>Save as .jpg/.png>eat a dick.

Apple owns a streaming service; Microsoft does not.

For 30+ years I've watched PC makers and the movie etc. industries try to stop people watching things they have legitimately purchased a licence to watch because some people use those avenues to piracy.

Everything from Macrovision to DVDCSS, to HDMI blacklisting to this nonsense where content won't show on secondary monitors, etc.

Hilariously, not once in those same 30 years, have those who pirate not been able to get a perfect copy of whatever content they want, even if that was a few months after the release.

The amount of money poured into this junk is just not worth it. The day a thing is released in the cinema, or Netflix or whatever, it's available online. They're literally punishing billions of people, for the sake of slightly hindering a few tens of people who pretty much aren't affected by such measures at all.

Apple TV partners, advertisers, and other fiscally-interested parties want to be able to sleep at night knowing their content can't be easily copied.

Since videos are a combination of several still frames and an audio track, someone somewhere could ostensible write a program to screenshot each frame, record the audio, put it all together, and presto, a bootleg copy is born.

Ringtones, were a small snippet of a song that they charged you more than the price of the real song to use when you're phone rung. I suspect the rights holders ( including apple), want to resurrect that kind of fee structure for snapshots of films or shows that can then be turned into memes. Charge per meme use => cash cow.

This, in fact, used to be a viable way to capture video assets when there was no other obvious solution.

You'd script a player or an app to advance one frame at a time, grabbing screens, then use something like AfterEffects or DeBabelIzer to turn the stills into a video track, then separately record the audio, analog through the headphone jack if you had to, and lay back the audio onto the video.

Of course, this would often fall out of sync due to problems with 29.97/30 fps, and you'd have trouble with things

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.

Hmmm, doesnt sound like a huge problem really. Sounds exactly like the kind of thing that someone could write a script to do. Chatgpt could probably write the code for you.