Ways to check if there is any screen capture software running with C#

Question

I am developing a software written in C# of exhibition of paid videos and need to create protections to avoid as much as possible that buyers distribute the videos irregularly.

For now I need to prevent capture software from running. The only alternative I had was to hook the Windows routines that are responsible for providing this capture and doing periodic checks, but I couldn’t find materials on how to do this.

What other alternatives are within reach of the platform. Net I can use to know if there is any software running that is capturing the screen?

Answer 1

I do not want to be pessimistic, but it is almost impossible to know/prevent executions of screen capture software, you can create a huge list of known capture software and make your software access the list of processes running windows, you will simply compare which process matches with your list of "unwanted capture software".

Or make your software access the list of applications installed in windows and see if any name matches your known list. if you have a positive response it is up to you to give an alert to the user or simply not to play the video.

To completely bar things of this kind you would have to practically rewrite the video driver, ie literally bar at the source!

Remembering that you still run the risk of the guy simply pick up a mobile/camera/camcorder and record.

To minimize you can stamp your videos with a watermark (Watermark), if the video leaks it will have your company logo, nowadays I know that some companies render brands at the time of the stream with subtle modifications for each user, with the naked eye all brands look the same, but when applied fingerprint(fingerprint) methods in the video leak it is possible to trace by this brand which user was responsible.

You can try accessing windows hot Keys from your application and try to disable the screenshot keys, see an example of how to log and disable print screen capture using C# here, if some capture software uses this same hot key to effect capture will no longer work, but unfortunately you will have little success, the vast majority of capture programs define their own hot Keys is almost like taking a shot in the dark.