Video feed from another computer

[SuzyQ]

I am interested in displaying a live video screen capture from another computer that would be networked to a computer running Vizard and rendering the live image to a render node. Is this possible?

[farshizzo]

Yes, this is technically possible, but would take a little work. Do you want to capture the output of another Vizard script or the entire desktop of another computer? Either way, you would need to downsample and compress the captured image in order to send it over the network in real-time. Then decompress it and load the data into a texture on the other end.

I've never actually done this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work as long as your network can support the bandwidth.

[SuzyQ]

I wanted to capture the desktop of another computer. What if I ran the other application on the same computer that I was running Vizard on and hooked up another monitor, thereby eliminating the data compression issue?

[farshizzo]

This would make it a lot easier. You might still need to reduce the size of the captured image in order to update the texture in real-time.

[SuzyQ]

Any hints on how to do this would be much appreciated. I would think that it's similar to rendering live video from a webcam to a node, however, I don't know what commands to use for the screen capture.