Why Microsoft Deserves To Die
So there I am, watching a video that I obtained in WMV format.
That’s not a format I like.
I was watching it in Windows Media Player version 11.0.5x.
And I wanted a screen capture.
So I hit PrintScreen on my keyboard.
Pasted it into MS Paint.
And discovered something very, very weird.
When I tried to save the screensnap — the entire dump of the screen — the portion of the screen that contained the video frame would turn all black!
If I tried to excise the video screen portion, paste it into a new MS Paint document, I’d get only a portion of it, despite the selection having grabbed the whole thing!
I even went so far to paste the entire screendump into MS Paint and then PrintScreen MS Paint!
The frikkin video still area still turned all black!
Now this is for a video that doesn’t have any DRM on it. Not one bit. It’s a video that’s intended to be passed around and shared. There’s nothing illegal or even gray-area about it!
But Microsoft apparently treats all video streams in Windows Media Player as if they were private property! And that anyone who wanted even a still frame was engaging in theft!
I’m using Windows XP. Windows Vista apparently has even worse DRM built into it right down to its very core.
I gave up on WMP and opened the video in vlc. I got my screensnaps just fine.
And this is why Microsoft deserves to die.
Microsoft no longer serves us. It serves its Corporate Masters.
Update: Alan Pritt in the Comments informs me of the non-DRM technical reason for the above. Still, Microsoft is doomed, as this other post done later today details.
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July 7, 2008 at 6:06 pm
This happens because video is hardware accelerated, and so is displayed on a separate image layer to what is captured during the print screen. I believe there is an option in Windows Media Player to turn off ‘overlays’, which stops the hardware acceleration (sorry for lack of details; I’m on a Mac at the moment). Then print screen should work.
So this isn’t the fault of DRM, it’s more of a bug that MS haven’t fixed.
July 7, 2008 at 6:51 pm
You’ll see I’ve made an update note to the post. Thanks.