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I couldn’t screenshot non-DRM videos on Windows XP either.

It’s because the video is being rendered on a different framebuffer for performance reasons.

Helpful for DRM too.

There's nothing stopping hardware accelerated decode being in the same framebuffer as everything else, the only reason for this is DRM - you get just the same acceleration with VLC, but can still screenshot.

The XP era is when we depended on fixed-function hardware overlays to scale video and handle yuv translation, and yes in that case you'd just get a magenta or blue background instead of the video. That era sucked, and hardware got better since then.

Those never went away, they're just called multiplane overlay (MPO) now and are better integrated into the system. The Windows 10/11 DWM automatically migrates swap chains in and out of independently flipped overlays to save power, and can recomposite them when screen capture is requested.

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