Comment Feed for Video Screen Recording (Coffeehouse on Channel 9)

Re: Video Screen Recording

Wayne Taylor — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:12:06 GMT

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.

Re: Re: Video Screen Recording

LeoDavidson — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:56:07 GMT

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.

Re: Video Screen Recording

ManipUni — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:31:35 GMT

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.

Re: Video Screen Recording

William Stacey — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:23:00 GMT

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/

Re: Video Screen Recording

obrienslalom — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:37:20 GMT

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.

Re: Video Screen Recording

Harlequin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:24:52 GMT

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.