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I intend to develop a screen recording software. Which is something similar to Microsoft's Live Meeting

Is it possible to write such App using Silverlight ?

P.S, the reason why I prefer is Silverlight is because of it's X-Platform support.

Karthik Mahalingam
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I don't know if the performance would be sufficiently good, but there is a CopyFromScreen method that will allow you to take screenshots from a given window. If you took screen shots at a sufficient frame rate you could stream them to the client.

See http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=303 for an example of how to capture the screenshots.

My understanding is bitmap sampling is a standard approach for this type of software.

Amasuriel
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  • @Amasuiel - I suppose, you are correct. Bitmap sampling would be the right approach. But I am not sure whether we could do screen capturing using Silverlight. My gut feeling(or atleast) I am hoping that this should be possible. Since silverlight provide features like WebCam access. I appreciate your help. Thanks again ! – Karthik Mahalingam Mar 30 '11 at 18:13
  • The Bitmap and Graphic objects are part of the Silverlight runtime, so it should work fine (though I have not tested it for this purpose). – Amasuriel Mar 30 '11 at 19:16
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Silverlight itself does not support screen grabs, so to get it working you would have to go outside of the Silverlight's sandbox.

With Silverlight 4 you can call external automation object (COM) to get screen shot and pass it to the application. Downsides for this approach are: requires elevated trust, windows only and requires additional install step.

Silverlight 5 will have support for P/Invoke and that should make things a bit easier. But that still leaves Mac out of the picture. In general I would say it is not worth doing it in Silverlight. Consider using .net + moonlight if portability is important to you.

Denis
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  • Thank you for the suggestions, I started looking for other possibilities as you mentioned. I believe it would be good to have this feature included Silverlight, Since Flex already has this support. – Karthik Mahalingam Mar 31 '11 at 13:48