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Experiencing a Green Screen on your Lecture Capture Recording?

The microphones worked fine in my session and the lecture capture light changed through green/amber/red as normal but the recordings are a green screen without sound. What happened and what can I do to solve this issue?

The display is showing as bright green because of something called 'HDCP' which automatically blocks high definition display signals from being recorded. All of our AV equipment is HDCP compliant so this rarely/if ever happens on campus when using the room Managed Desktop Computer or Microsoft Windows based laptops.

However, if the lecturer is using a Mac, or Apple device we have noted that these devices are notorious for triggering HDCP blocks, even when the recording device is listed as HDCP compliant.

Unfortunately because of this, the green screen is all that gets recorded and there is no way to salvage the content that is blocked.

To ensure this doesn't happen on future recordings, we've found the best way to avoid this is to connect the Mac via a VGA cable/adapter instead of the HDMI cable. This will not trigger any HDCP blocks.

Can you turn off HDCP on Mac?

You can work around HDCP by using the analogue connection described above, but at the time of publication, no solution exists to disable HDCP completely on Macs.