0

I have a simple digital signage solution with a presentation application in WPF. I would like to "monitor" it from my remote machine. I would like to send a stream of the content the application is showing now (images, video, userControls, etc.).

How to do this, do i need to manually take a screenshot and send it in a video stream to my monitor - how to encode it into a stream the monitoring application can playback (that one is also WPF).

Brian Hvarregaard
  • 4,081
  • 6
  • 41
  • 77
  • Do you need to see a "live video" at a high framerate, or do you simply need to monitor it and "snapshots" every second or so would work fine? – Steven Robbins Aug 17 '11 at 12:53
  • snapshots each second would be fine, that way videos, animations and interactive content would be visible in the monitoring application. 1 second would be sufficient. – Brian Hvarregaard Aug 17 '11 at 16:47

1 Answers1

1

Ok, if snapshots are ok then I've done this before. The way I did it was to take a "screenshot" of the app (using code you can find here: http://www.grumpydev.com/2009/01/03/taking-wpf-screenshots/ ) then have the signage app spin up a webservice (HttpListener, WCF or SelfHosted Nancy) that returns the current screen whenever a request is made to a particular url. You monitor app then polls that url however often you need to.

This was done to monitor an interactive game for a Surface device, and didn't seem to cause any perf issues, so should be fine for your needs.

Steven Robbins
  • 26,441
  • 7
  • 76
  • 90