Live screen capture as video input device

Is there a way to do a live screen capture of a portion of the screen and immediately use that as a video input on the same computer?

The reason for wanting to do this: I have a project with a large LED video pixel display. It is controlled by ecue hardware & software (running on a PC), so the only obvious way to map live VVVV content across it would be to have VVVV running on a second PC, and have the video output of that second PC captured by the 1st.

Now I know that would work, but there must be a way to do have the Ecue software manager and VVVV running on the same machine? The ecue software manager can map video from any recognized windows video capture device – so is there a way to get a VVVV render window recognized as a video device???

see http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=Software+Tool+Links#Screen_Capture_Tools

for techsmiths camtasia.
should allow live capturing of screen content and streams as a video device.
don’t expect high quality and usable frame rates…

but please share your experiences here!

hmm … how is ecue controlling this LED-wall ?
Wouldn´t it perhaps be more straight forward end maybe even easier to think about how to drive the LED-wall directly from VVVV without using ecue at all ?

Markus

@Kalle, Thank you for the suggestions. Another tool I am going to try that sounds like it should work is VH Screen Capture (http://www.hmelyoff.com/index.php?section=4)… have you ever come across this?

@MSBERGER. I know you are right, but I unfortunately don’t have a choice at the moment. The whole installation is already installed and the interfaces used to the DMX led panels is the ecue butler (http://www.ecue.tv/butler.860.0.html), which operates on ecue’s own protocol. I know there is some work being done to have the ecue butler supported within VVVV – I can’t wait for that to happen!

have you ever come across this?

just looking inside. seems to be interesting!!

I know there is some work being done to have the ecue butler supported within VVVV

i heard some rumours from a co-partner of ecue, but can’t tell anything about this right now. MSBERGER for sure knows remembers/knows what i’m talking about.

amazing tool.

capture your renderers output and stream to skype.

Yes, it is very cool!

I’ve been playing around with it and found all kinds of neat and useful applications. For what I have been wanting to do it works well, and ends up being a curiously fast way to map VVVV output over 22 DMX universes… On my macpro laptop, I am getting a lag of about .5 seconds, but no drop in framerate or loss of quality.

As a complete tangent to my original thread (which is now answered via this VH Screen Capture Software), it strikes me that you could boygroup vvvv applications over the internet via skype video conference… ;)

I am not sure if you are aware of the possibility to do screen capture with ecue. Within the ecue programmer, you can do direct screen capture, that means that you can have vvvv and ecue running on the same computer at the same time. I have done a piece of art work that uses max/msp and ecue programmer to do exactly the same thing; however, i am not too sure of the performance limitation to such method. I was generating some other graphics on the side on max/msp and have that video signal fed to a video processor that processes that and output onto a LED screen, then also generating some small patterns have have ecue do screen capture and output that to a bunch of LED fixtures via the ecue butler. I was able to get decent frame rates (avg 29fps) and the graphics card that i was using was a 8800GTX.

btw dommeruk… my name is kevin, coworker of nick @ DU in HK… he forwarded this forum thread to me… just thought i would introduce myself. Nice meeting you.

Hi levvvvky/Kevin!
Small world - thanks for your reply and advice. I will try this out in the next couple days and will report back here on which process gives the highest frame rate.
thanks, d.