Preventing screen recording apps

Question

If I have a website that contains paid videos and I want to prevent authorized / unauthorized users from downloading the video, we can make it as difficult as we can but we still cannot 100% prevent stealing videos.

A user still can record screen using many existing apps, I thought about it too much and looked for anything I can do to prevent it but as I got OS will not allow web browsers to detect screen record apps.

Q1. But can I develop a program (desktop app) that can detect screen recorder apps?

I'm asking because if I could manage to build such a program I can use it to know whether the user records the videos or not while opening the website and hence take a counteraction.

The flow would be like so:

• Whenever a user opens my website, I check if the desktop app is running or not.

• If it is not, the video will not be played until the app is run.

• If the desktop app is running, then check if there is a screen recording app is also running at the same time or not.

• If a screen recording app is running, then the video won't be played.

Q2. Is this idea even possible to implement?

Answer 1

You cannot determine what another program is doing, so you cannot detect that a program is recording the screen.

You can, however, determine what programs are currently running. So at best you can tell that “RecordLive!.exe” is running, or “VidCapture.exe” is running, and refuse to play your video if either are running, or stop it if such a program starts.

Unfortunately, if a new capture program comes out you’ll have to update your list. Or if I write my own “MyCapture.exe” you’ll never detect it. Or worse, if I rename an existing program to “MyCapture.exe”, you won’t detect it.

So, in short: nice theory, but not practical.