Capturing Netflix with GifCam

Feb 06 2020 Published by under GifCam

I’ve received some feedback about getting a black gif when using GifCam to capture Netflix and other apps & webs, I’m not into movies  & shows , but anyway I created a new basic Netflix account to find out the case.

DirectX

at first I thought it’s a technical problem, where the Netflix stream goes into GPU/graphics card instead of RAM , and that’s why it can’t be captured, so I wrote DirectX level capturing code to capture the  pixels from the GPU, but that didin’t work, it turned out that Netflix martials is copyrighted with something called DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Virtual Machine

After that I thought to run Netflix inside a virtual machine (I used Microsoft Windows Simulator) and with that the pixels would not be blocked or restricted when capturing from the host, and I was right :)

FireFox

Then I googled the subject more, and found that the browser Firefox  has a feature to disable DRM tools, actually the DRM is disabled by default, so you can run Netflix inside Firefox without any capturing restriction, and that is the easier way I guess.

But is it illegal to make gifs from Netflix?

I don’t know, but you must follow the Netflix Terms of Use and the copyright law

Finally

That was a little research I made, and I hope you find it useful :)

8 responses so far

  • Buk says:

    I just got GifCam, and may I congratulate you on the simplicity and efficiency of the design.

    Having tried half a dozen other screenvid apps, GifCam is a breath of fresh air. Simple to install; simple to use; and brilliant (incredibly small) results.

    I do have one issue; I’m capturing sessions from a CAD program, (https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/mechanical-software) which works perfectly except, GifCam does “see” (capture) manual changes to on-screen edit fields.

    You see the edit field and its contents before changes are made; and you see the new value (and the effects of the change on screen) after the edit is made, but the process of deleting the existing value and typing the new one is completely absent.

    Is this a known limitation? (Or maybe something unique to my machine?)

    Is there a bug reporting mechanism? I have a 100kb gif that shows the problem.

  • 노정기 says:

    반갑습니다.
    여기는 한국입니다.
    애플 사이트에서 video story maker을 구입했습니다.
    텍스트 음성 지원은 되는데…. 전체적인 음성이 지원이 안됩니다.
    왜 그런지 답변 부탁합니다.

    • Isa says:

      앱을 구입해 주셔서 감사합니다.
      TTS (텍스트 음성 변환) 지원이 없으며 스토리를 읽고 내레이션하며 앱에서 스토리와 함께 음성을 녹음합니다.

  • David says:

    Why can’t I turn off greenscreen? No matter how many times I tick off draw green screen/show green screen, it still ruins my gif.

  • Jesse says:

    So, will there be an update that addresses this?

    • Isa says:

      I will check if there is a coding way to disable DRM from video source? but you can disabled DRM from Firefox , Chrome and Edge then capture Netflix from the browser window.

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