Situation: I have a software that performs screen sharing over the Internet, where one user acts as a presenter, and other users act as viewers/attendees.
Besides the presentation windows, the presenter also has a set of NON-SHARING-WINDOWS that appear on the screen (a button bar for start sharing/stop sharing/etc., a Skype window etc.).
The presenter can configure from the setup of the screen sharing software to make these NON-SHARING-WINDOWS invisible (i.e. they will not appear in the screen sharing that is being sent to the attendees, but the window content behind them will appear in the screenshot).
The screenshots are sent at approximately 10 frames-per-second, or faster.
Question: how can I programmatically capture the screen, except for these NON-SHARING-WINDOWS windows?
Notes:
- Because of the higher frames-per-second value, I cannot minimize/maximize/set alpha for these windows, because then the windows will flicker. The application is written in Win32 C++.
- I would use layered windows, but because of the Windows 7 Desktop Composition feature, this is not usable out-of-the-box (and in Windows 8, you cannot use DwmEnableComposition anymore to temporarily and programmatically disable composition)
- I could use the layered window approach for Windows XP/2000/7 etc., and a different approach for Windows 8 (if there is one), though I would prefer a single process that works on all systems
- I could also try to "compose" the screenshots by capturing individual images (of the desktop, the windows that need to be captured) and using their z-index to create the final image, but because of the required frames-per-second value, this process would be too slow.