Send HWND Over Network

John Corigliano 1 Reputation point
2020-12-14T19:02:14.08+00:00

Is there an API to capture an HWND and send it over the network to another desktop application on a different PC?

We have a 3rd party program that will accept an HWND and stream video to that. We want to have that 3rd party program send the video to a different computer but the only parameter it accepts is an HWND.

Basically we want to do something like Zoom desktop capture but only a specific window. We are willing to write an app to relay the data over the network. Something like this:

48043-xp-cap.png

The program running on PC2 is an existing MFC C++ app but the relay program on PC1 hasn't been created yet and can be C++, C# or whatever is needed.

C#
C#
An object-oriented and type-safe programming language that has its roots in the C family of languages and includes support for component-oriented programming.
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C++
C++
A high-level, general-purpose programming language, created as an extension of the C programming language, that has object-oriented, generic, and functional features in addition to facilities for low-level memory manipulation.
2,743 questions

2 answers

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  1. Tim Roberts 81 Reputation points
    2020-12-14T20:35:19.187+00:00

    No. An HWND is meaningful only on the machine that created it. There are several applications that can do window capture and stream it over a network. You could then use something like VLC to show it on PC2.

  2. Cheong00 3,426 Reputation points
    2020-12-15T02:33:03.527+00:00

    Generally the way to do it is either write your own display driver filter to log any change to display and send it to remote computer, or to add a GDI+ subsystem level filter to capture the GDI+ API commands and send it to remote computer to replay it (much like what WMF/EMF do, it let you replay the sequence of command you used to draw the image on another device context)