Can you stop people screen recording your videos?
Mostly yes, on most devices — and never against a phone camera. Here is exactly what happens on each platform, so you can decide with the real picture rather than a marketing one.
With hardware DRM the decoded video never reaches the part of the system a screen recorder can read, so the recording comes out black. That is an operating-system behaviour, not a trick the player can do on its own — which is why it needs DRM and cannot be bolted on with JavaScript.
| Where it is watched | A screen recording gets |
|---|---|
| Safari on macOS | Black frames FairPlay on the hardware path; macOS screen capture records black where protected video is composited. |
| iPhone and iPad | Black frames FairPlay; the system screen recorder and screenshots both come out black. |
| Edge on Windows | Black frames PlayReady hardware DRM (SL3000) on supported machines. |
| Chrome on Windows / macOS | Usually black frames Widevine L1 blacks out capture where the device supports it. On machines that fall back to L3, a recorder can still capture the picture. |
| Android | Black frames Widevine L1 on most modern devices; FLAG_SECURE blocks the system recorder. |
| A phone camera pointed at the screen | Records fine No DRM on any platform prevents this. It always produces a visibly worse copy, and a watermark makes it traceable. |
The part most pages leave out
Chrome on a machine that falls back to Widevine L3 can still be recorded. You do not control which level a viewer's device uses — the hardware does. Treat DRM as removing the clean, redistributable copy rather than as making recording impossible, and pair it with a viewer-identifying watermark so that whatever does get out points back to an account.
Questions
Can you stop someone screen recording your video?
On most devices, yes — with hardware DRM the protected video never reaches the part of the system a screen recorder can read, so the recording comes out black. Safari, iOS, Edge with PlayReady and most Android devices behave this way. Chrome on a machine that falls back to Widevine L3 is the common exception. And nothing stops someone filming the screen with a second phone.
Does this work without DRM?
No. Blocking right-click, detecting the PrintScreen key or overlaying the player are client-side tricks that a determined viewer bypasses in a minute, and that fail silently against any external recorder. The black-frame behaviour comes from the operating system honouring a hardware-protected media path, and that only exists when the content is DRM-encrypted.
What about Widevine L1 versus L3?
L1 means the decryption and decoding happen inside the device's trusted execution environment, so the decoded frames never enter ordinary memory — that is what produces black frames in a recording. L3 means it is done in software, which is still real encryption but the decoded picture is reachable, so capture can succeed. You do not choose this; the device does, based on its hardware. This is why DRM should be described as raising the cost of copying rather than preventing it.
So is DRM worth it if a camera still works?
Yes, for a reason worth being precise about. Piracy at scale needs a clean, redistributable file. DRM removes the clean file, leaving only a camera recording — worse quality, out of sync, visibly filmed, and with a watermark that identifies the account it came from. You have not made copying impossible; you have made the copy bad and the copier identifiable, which is what stops your course appearing on a download site.
What does it cost to have this?
Studio DRM is on every StreamVault plan, from $12/month, with 1,000 protected plays included on the entry plan. Most platforms sell DRM as an add-on starting around $99/month on top of hosting. There is a sourced, dated comparison on our DRM pricing page.