Desktop movement streaming to LAN

[Cuong Tong]

Hi All,

I'd like to start up a personal coding for fun project which performs some
desktop movement recording/(then)streaming. Basically all i want to do is to
have few users on LAN to be able to see what I am doing on my desktop sort
of like MS Live meeting but this is for LAN.

I did some research around and found few articles which describe how to do
with with Direct Show, GDI and something else which I dont remember (on code
project) which ddin't work for me (didn't compile).

I also looked at camstudio on sourceforge but that also didn't compile.

I was thinking using the following approach

Use GDI to take a snapshot of the desktop every 100 milisecond, then encode
this into avi or wmf, then streaming this via UDP protocol.

I haven't tried the above out, but it seems a bit resource intensive to me.
So I am just wondering if anyone has any experiences on this or that you
could point me to some resources that I can dig a bit more into.

Any help is very much appreciated.

 

[Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen]

Hi All,

I'd like to start up a personal coding for fun project which performs
some desktop movement recording/(then)streaming. Basically all i want to
do is to have few users on LAN to be able to see what I am doing on my
desktop sort of like MS Live meeting but this is for LAN.

I did some research around and found few articles which describe how to
do with with Direct Show, GDI and something else which I dont remember
(on code project) which ddin't work for me (didn't compile).

I also looked at camstudio on sourceforge but that also didn't compile.

I was thinking using the following approach

Use GDI to take a snapshot of the desktop every 100 milisecond, then
encode this into avi or wmf, then streaming this via UDP protocol.

I haven't tried the above out, but it seems a bit resource intensive to
me. So I am just wondering if anyone has any experiences on this or that
you could point me to some resources that I can dig a bit more into.

Any help is very much appreciated.

My pet project, PresentationMode, takes snapshots of thedesktop a number
of times each second and just displays it on a second monitor. This
program easily uses up all the cpu resources on the machine, even when
I'm not doing anything but just displaying the image unaltered.

I'd imaging adding encoding + streaming protocols into the mix will
further degrade either the speed or what's left of your available cpu
resources.

What you're describing is something I have in my todo list for a future
version of my program, but I'd imagine I need some sort of magical way
of getting the data prepared fast enough.

If you want I can try to just extract a portion of my program, the part
that grabs bitmaps, and you can see where that leads you.

 

[Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen]

Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen wrote:

If you want I can try to just extract a portion of my program, the part
that grabs bitmaps, and you can see where that leads you.

http://home.online.no/~lvkarlse/ScreenGrabberTest.zip

I made this in VS2008 so if you're using 2005 you might need to create a
new project and add the MainForm files to that project, I used .NET 2.0
so nothing should be incompatible with 2005 except for the solution and
project file formats.

 

[Cuong Tong]

H Lasse,

Thank you very much for sharing this. You're right, it's a bit resource
intensive. I'll let you know if i make any progress.

Cheers