Is it possible to capure a specific control's ui,given its hwnd value

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I am first stating my objective and then coming to some questions which I want to clarify

Objective: I want to capture the images from a flash player control embedded in a webbrowser. Say, I want to grab 15 images per second from the youtube player with annotations and encode them into a video or a live webcam or broadcast within a browser. (Youtube downloaders dont render annotations into video frames)

The easiest solution is, Use a video screen recorder tool, but theres a catch...I dont want to occupy my screen with that application to take the snapshots..

I want to do it like, if I could get the HANDLE of that control, then using its HDC property, I will make those images using the API blitblt and save those images or record it into a video.. In this way I can use any other app on the screen, but the recording is being done behind the scene... Once Itried to do that, now I am coming to the questions

I saw when the window was minimized, the it is capturing blank images.... When I am switching browser tabs, its recording the same region on my screen on the new tab, but not the flash player control. I thought since I introduced the hdc of my flash player control to my app it will always record or capture that handle only.

I know my post became slightly bigger, but I tried to state clearly my objective and my approach to get the job done...and to get expert opinion... Any good suggestions will be highly appreciated.. Thanks in advance

Posted 5-Jun-12 7:36am

pras3njit

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 5-Jun-12 16:50pm

I don't think this is a good idea. You just need to develop proper Youtube downloader. All it does is extracting the downloading URL from the page URL, and then you can download the flash as one file the usual way, and of course, without any browser and without playing. Encoding the file on the fly is quite possible but very impractical. It's far better to download the files as is and later convert. Some user would use the files in FLV or whatever...

I do have such downloader working in batch mode, which is actually the best option.
--SA

pras3njit 6-Jun-12 11:28am

Thank you SAKryukov, I am not totally disagreeing with you. Its very impractical. But As I also mentioned that on many youtube videos, it comes with Subtitles as annotations. Which are separate files and they are not "rendered" in the flv or mp4 video frames (Many times the author rectify their mistakes in the video through those annotations, so if you have only downloaded those videos you will collect some erroneous tutorial..may in most part of it it is good and worth downloading).

But my scope goes beyond youtube videos. How can you download a file when the video is streamed "LIVE" from a server REAL TIME on your browser. Youtube videos are in some sense have a specific duration and size. But live webcam videos dont So Screen capture is the only way AFAIK.

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