How does Netflix prevent screen shots?

Factual Questions
1

I am not asking about how to circumvent their protection of their IP or do anything else that even has a whiff of anything illegal.

I am just wondering from a technical perspective how they do this.

Context is the Netflix web site on a Chrome browser on Windows 10.

I tried to take a screenshot of a single frame of a movie I was watching and the movie clip was black. I can see the controls, but the actual movie shot was black. I had also tried to use PowerDirector to do video capture with similar results.

I always thought that when you did a screenshot, it was a transaction between you and your graphics card. It just grabbed whatever was actually being shown on the screen. How can a web site override this?

2

Not sure these days (technology marches on), but back in the day any screen capture attempted while watching video that used hardware acceleration would return a black screen.

Whenever I needed to do a screen capture (e.g. for posting something to this site), I would turn off hardware acceleration, play the video (awful performance), take the screen shot, then turn the acceleration back on.

It’s not a piracy thing, it’s more about the video card saying to Windows “Hey, I’ll do my own super fast stuff on this rectangle of screen, you don’t need to worry about it”, so a Window screen cap gets the black screen as a result.

3

NM. Basically just repeating what minor7flat5 said about hardware acceleration. My PC is a few years old, but that’s basically what happens with me.

4

I will see if I can temporarily turn that off to confirm that’s what happens. But wouldn’t that affect virtually every other video no matter what the source is?

5

Is this a recent thing? I successfully captured images from Netflix a couple of years ago.

6

I noticed it recently, never tried it before.

7

There is a means of obtaining screen shots from Netflix with a default program on your computer, but I don’t know if talking about it would violate the board rules.

8

There is nothing intrinsically illegal, or violative of copyright, from taking a still of a movie, and even reusing it in other things with limited scope–i.e. for purposes of criticism, news reporting, parody, commentary, archiving–your basic fair use scenarios etc.

9

I just take a picture of it with my phone, seems to work good enough.

10

works OK on a chromebook, just tried it now

11

I am not looking for a workaround. I am interested in the technical means for blocking screen shots.

12

What method are you using for a screen shot?

I just tried it on Edge, Windows 10 by doing CTRL+PrtScrn and then pasting into a new document in Photoshop. The clip was there no problem.

I also tried the Windows 10 “Snip & Sketch” tool. That worked as well (but it only was able to capture the frame that was on screen when I clicked “new” - it basically froze the shot while the video continued in the background).

Anyway not sure it’s a Netflix thing. Might be a Chrome thing?

13

I’m fairly certain Netflix is doing nothing to block them, as others have said it is likely a quirk of how your computer is transcoding video using your GPU + Windows Operating System features. Could also be something weird with the screen clipping tool(s) you’re using.

14

PrtScn button. I also tried the Windows Snipping Tool. When I click New, the movie part of the screen goes black. As I mentioned before, I tried capturing a video clip with PowerDirector and the same thing happens.

I’ll try this on another machine and see what happens. I just assumed Netflix was blocking it because it’s the only time this ever happens. I have no problem with YouTube videos, Facebook videos, or any other videos or images.

15

I am not the only person asking this. Google “why can’t I take a screenshot of netflix”

16

I was able to snip an image in both Chrome and Edge, so it doesn’t seem so.

17

Works fine for me. Screen capture in 4K with no special apps. (Windows 10 and Chrome)

18

Are there any other applications running? When my work computer wasn’t taking them, I shut down all the programs in the systray and it worked. I eventually isolated it to the citrix launch app.

19

I just used the PrtSc button to take a screenshot of a playing Netflix video, it captured the scene with zero issue. It is almost definitely not Netflix causing this.

20

I’m on my iPhone at the moment and I was curious. I played a random Netflix show and I got the black screen too. When the movie was paused I could see the controls and the subtitles but a black picture.

But when I tried the same test with AmazonPrime, the screen shot worked fine.