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How to Protect Online Videos from Screen Recording?



All the screen capture programs interact with the graphics engine to capture the image of the screen at a piont in time. No events are triggered in the browser when that happens. So there is no way for a browser to detect the screen recording.

Unfortunately, no websites on the internet can 100% stop the screen recording. Some websites claim that they are using DRM security to protect videos from screen recording but it works only in some of the browsers and there are multiple ways to screen record those videos in other browsers.

Currently, there is no technology available which can guarantee you 100% protection from screen recording. Below are the main reasons why:

  • There is no Web API to stop screen recording. So the websites running in the browser cannot know for 100% if a screen recorder is running or not.
  • Even if there an API available, it would be possible to reverse engineer the browser/OS to allow for screen recording.
  • Even if there was a technology available, you could just point a camera at the screen and start recording.

How to protect Videos?

  • It takes too much time, energy and resources for people to record one video at a time on their device. It means that for a 3 hour-long video, they need to spend 3 hours to record it. So normally this is NOT the biggest risk.
  • Normally the biggest risk is unwanted video downloads.
  • Most of the people who steal videos, they don't want to spend hours and hours per video to screen record your whole video library, it will take them weeks or even months to record your thousands of videos.
  • So, if your videos are protected against unwanted/illegal downloads, a large number of viewers won't bother spending huge amount of time to screen record them.
  • You can use dynamic watermark on your videos to show the viewers' IPs or usernames. So, if the videos are downloaded, their details would be on the video.
  • You can turn on video encryption in DynTube to protect videos against illegal downloads. The videos won't play if downloaded.