vlbrown-mzydt

I recently upgraded our Mac Mini to Mac OS X 10.9 (aka Mavericks). This Mac Mini is connected to our television screen; we use it primarily for movies and tv shows played via Amazon or iTunes.

Imagine my surprise when I tried to play a purchased tv series episode and saw this:

I did some searching online. I was not the first person to have this experience.

A few people have figured out what the underlying issue. Apparently, "Video playback of protected content is disallowed if remote access is enabled."

Okaaay… I disagree with this in principle. Yes, that's "protected content", but I paid for the privilege of viewing it. However, the whole DRM thing is a big can of philosophical worms, and I'm not really trying to get into that at the moment.

What I am going to argue, vehemently, about, is the symptoms: a gray screen, no alert message, the need to do a web search, discovering that many people have also tripped over this issue and a small number have managed to figure out the "fix" by experimentation. I filed a bug report (#17852793).

To which Developer Tech Support responded, "Engineering has determined that this issue behaves as intended."

No.

Just. No.

While I disagree with the underlying philosophy of refusing to play DRM video through a remote connection, that's not the bug I'm reporting.

The bug is that if I try to play purchased video while Remote Management is enabled (whether or not anyone is actually connected remotely), the result is:

• no alert or error message
• a gray screen
• audio
• maybe one or two frames of video depending how you move the mouse
• the playback stops

A well-considered design would, instead:

• Check for an actual remote connection, not just that Remote Management is enabled in System Preferences.
• Determine if the remote connection is from an authorized computer.
• If there is a remote connection running from an unauthorized computer, post an alert.
• otherwise play the video, because both computers are authorized to do so.

No gray screen. No audio without video. No partial video.

I am certain that no one actually sat in a meeting and explicitly designed this "gray screen with audio and occasional flickers of video" response to the requirement "disable video playback over a remote connection". I cannot imagine the current behaviour is truly "as intended".

Unfortunately, I can't seem to convince Apple Developer Tech Support to send my bug report to someone who will actually read it.