Screen recorder

You could try Windows Media Encoder (freeware, wmv/asf only) or VLC (GPL, Win/OSX/Linux). Be aware that "hardware accelerated" views (Direct3D & OpenGL rendering for example) will not be available, and some quality loss will be experienced due to video compression. How much you lose will depend on your settings (codec, bitrate, resolution, etc)

Example: How to Stream your Desktop using VLC

vlc screen:// :screen-fps=30 :screen-caching=100 --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=4096,acodec=mpga,ab=256,scale=1,width=1280,height=800}:rtp{dst=192.168.1.2,port=1234,access=udp,mux=ts}'

You can find more options in VLC documentation, for saving your stream as a file for example.


FFMPEG supports screen capturing(casting) and is cross platform.


This is the one I use with Delphi, it's called "Professional Screen Camera Component". Admittedly I had to make some changes to support unicode versions (replace PChar with PAnsiChar, replace Char with AnsiChar).

It'll happily record away at whatever framerate I set it to, will encode the video with whatever codec I specify (if I want it to), and allows you to specify the region you wish to record.

Comes with a demo project too!

Oh, and it's free/open source!