Video Screen Recording

Hi All,

We have an internal app which we use to remote into PC's using RDP, which then prompts the support desk to enter a report of work done.  Were looking at capturing there actions in a video format.  I've been looking for a .NET  library for this but can't fins one.

Any suggestions?

That's gonna be heavy on system resources, no? You want to make a behind-the-scenes, non noticable, video feed made up of dozens of screenshots a second of what the user is doing in the app when connected?

I think it would be better to capture button clicks, texts inputted, etc, into a database or something.

I don't know about a .net library...but you might want to look into the products by TechSmith.  Of course their famous Camtasia Studio is the popular one for video capture, but UserVue and Morae might be of interest to you.

hmm.  Maybe make Support users rdp into a common server (or server farm).  This server will have its screen captured all the time with a video card output (for example).  You may also be able to trigger recording based on login/logout for example so your not recording 24 hours.  Support person will then RDP into customer's desktop from the server session.  You could set firewall rules to restrict rdp from only these "recording" servers.  A side benifit is your not dogging the server with screen capture because your doing it in hw video port.  Also security may be improved because you have auditing on the server (logins, etc) and limit number of vectors.  You can record to tape or another system dedicated to recordings.

Maybe some hdmi card like:http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/software/

I'm not entirely sure what the point of doing this is, but assuming one exists, maybe capture a screenshot once per second? I'm sure that is a horrible idea but it would work in a very brute-force kind of a way. It wouldn't be video but more like a slideshow.

Just patch the BMP images into a GIF animation and you have yourself a moderately small history of what someone did. As I said, likely a bad idea though.

Harlequin said:

That's gonna be heavy on system resources, no? You want to make a behind-the-scenes, non noticable, video feed made up of dozens of screenshots a second of what the user is doing in the app when connected?

I think it would be better to capture button clicks, texts inputted, etc, into a database or something.

On a modern PC you usually can't tell that Camtasia is in the background capturing video. If the CPU or HDD become too loaded I think it'll result in choppy video rather than slowing down the interactive session. YMMV and I'm not saying it will definitely work but it's certainly worth a try.

Hi All,

Thanks for the replies.   We also use logmein (http://logmein.com) sometimes and this offers recording feature which is what I would like to build into our app, so I didn't think it would be that unusual.

There solution outputs to an AVI file, which we store on a local server share.

EDIT: Typo correction.