Detect if screen is being recorded by any application?

[dreamy fern]

Is there a way to do this?

[dreamy fern]

I know macOS has an accessibility API which may be able to be checked, what windows?

Is there a bash or powershell command which will let me know whether the screen is being shared or not?

[hoary mantle]

Unfortunately there isn’t a simple “screen recording detector” built into Electron or the OS that you can just query from JavaScript. In fact, services like Netflix for example don’t actually detect a recorder process they simply render your video through a protected (DRM) pipeline that can’t be grabbed by a normal screen recorder.

I think Electron gives you a very easy way to prevent native screen capture on Windows and macOS:

const win = new BrowserWindow({ /* … */ });
win.setContentProtection(true);

this just wont tell you if someone tried to record it will stop the majority of OS/User level grabs.

not sure how intense of a detection you need but if that code doesnt workout for you, youll likely need to develop your own DRM Pipeline.

[dreamy fern]

@hoary mantle Thank you, that's really helpful. I mainly just want to check if there is any screen-recording present, or if the user is in a video call, and if they are, then I will run a function

[hoary mantle]

You can always write soemthing that detects this using Node Native Addons basically lets you write some c++ code and create bindings for it in JavaScript / Typescript

[dreamy fern]

That'w what chatgpt was saying, howveer not sure f there are any cli commands that can return that sort of information

[hoary mantle]

It’s going to be platform dependent too right. There are some really best low level tricks you can do to monitor this kind of things but it’s definitely not a quick implementation by any means

[hoary mantle]

I’d try this first see if it works for your use case and if not than developing something more robots would be better

[dreamy fern]

yep exactly, i plan on supporting macos and windows only for now tbf

[dreamy fern]

i have added this line to my code and will look into ths deeper again once i have finished some other more urgent features

[hoary mantle]

I develop a lot of low level applications, I’m an embedded systems software engineer by default and if you need any help writing the c++ code for something more relevant bust feel free to DM me