The VideoLAN Forums

Bottom line up front: is there a way to prevent VLC from being able to save a streaming video to a file?

Now some background: at work, we use Helix to serve various media files and Quicktime to play them on user machines. We often need to encode the same DVD multiple times because we need copies with and without subtitles. With 64-bit Handbrake and 64-bit VLC, we would be able to make only one encoding with all the subtitle options we'd like, saving us loads of hard drive space by not having to serve two different media files just for the sake of subtitles. However, we must also prevent users from capturing our streams and taking them home. So, as much as I'd like to transition to VLC, we can't do so unless we can disable stream capturing. Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks.

Remove all stream output, the demuxdump demux, the record stream filter. the yuv video output and the file audio output from the VLC plugins directories. The options will still be visible, but they won't work anymore.

Of course, anybody can still reinstall an uncrippled version of VLC, a competing piece of software with the same functionality, or just reroute the regular video and/or audio outputs to a virtual device.