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Is it possible to edit video so iPhone can’t take a photo/video of content?
Hi Forum,
an absolute noob here, so possibly a silly question.
I wonder if it’s possible through video editing, to purposefully induce screen capture distortion effects on a video to such an extent that when presented on a monitor/laptop/projector, it makes capturing a clear photo or video of the content using an iPhone nearly impossible, while still remaining intelligible to the human eye (without causing seizures).
A bit of background. I recently attended a conference and used my iPhone 13 to take some Live Photos of the presented slides. While visually I could see the presented material without any issue, my iPhone photos had all sorts of distortions that made it difficult to read the content. I was surprised that my iPhone was stumped by a simple projector’s refresh rate.
Now I’m curious, is it possible to use video editing to purposefully induce these effects?
e.g. Could I edit video of a slide presentation so that if I were to take a photo of the content that is presented on my MacBook 2014 Retina display, or my Dell 1080 60FPS monitor the captured photos or video would be too distorted for me to read, while the original content would still be visually intelligible to me.
I’ve tried to research the matter, but I’ve never seen anything exploring how to induce, not reduce, these distortions.
Thanks for the help, hopefully it’s an interesting question!
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3 Replies
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It’s an interesting idea.
It’s sort of like HDCP (copy protection) which allows you to play a video but prevents electronic copying. Or maybe it’s like what’s done with playing Netflix or AppleTV on your computer. You can see the movie but if you try to record it with Quicktime the video is blank.
See this
It seems the best they can do is a digital watermark that is traceable.
https://pallycon.com/blog/choose-your-weapon-to-fight-screen-recording-piracy/
pallycon.com
Choose Your Weapon to Fight Screen Recording Piracy - PallyCon
The history of the content industry has been accompanied by the fight against illegal content leakage. The so-called ‘cam version’ is one of the most traditional methods for movie content piracy. The movie industry, which has made theater releases difficult … Continue reading
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And this mentions a patent for infra red technology which the eye won’t see but the camera will and therefore impact the image in that regard.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6018374
patents.google.com
A method and system for preventing a visible video copy being made of a projected image on a screen. In a theater environment, an image is projected upon a screen by a film projector or a video projector. A form … Continue reading
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Hi Craig,
thank you for your response. Apologies that it took me a while to get back to you, the Autumn flu hit me quite hard.
Both links are fascinating, particularly the idea of embedding forensic watermarks in an image or item that is capture. Thank you for sending them through.
Do you think that it could be possible to at least mimic the reduced refresh speed that one would expect to cause such capture issues?
In essence, let’s assume a screen has 60 FPS. The screen shows black, however every second frame will show an image. Meaning that the screen alternates between black and an image. Wouldn’t the screen as far as the external capture device be concerned in essence exhibit a 30FPS?
Or am I misunderstanding the matter?
Thank you!
Ariel
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