How to capture screen using Flash Player?

Report · Feb 08, 2016

Hello,

I need to capture the whole screen and send the images using H264 to AMS (Adobe Media Server). Is it possible? For sure from an AIR application. Can Flash Player do this?

Can someone help me?

Best regards,

Manel

Report · Feb 08, 2016

There's a long and nuanced answer, but the short one is no. Flash by itself isn't going to magically broadcast the screen to FMS for you.

If you're just wanting to broadcast your screen to FMS, take a look at the free Flash Media Encoder: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-media-encoder.html

Report · Feb 09, 2016

Hello jeromiec83223024,

It's possible using Flash and AS3 to stream the camera to one AMS using the class NetStream.as as you can do the same using Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE).

But I want to know if there is some option to capture the screen "as a camera" to send the content to AMS. I think that this option is not allowed in FMLE.

Best regards,

Manel

Report · Feb 09, 2016

You wouldn't be able to fake a camera in ActionScript. It's really tied to hardware webcams. For screencasting with Adobe Connect, we have to install the standalone Connect Add-in, which handles the actual screen capture. You *can* add screen capture filters to FMLE, which would allow you to broadcast from the same machine.

In theory, you could probably write a library that captured bitmap data objects of the pixels that Flash *thinks* are on the screen (hardware compositing in the browser means that we may not know about things composited from above by the browser, etc), but you're talking about a non-trivial project using low level data and network APIs, and I doubt that you'd ever get stellar performance. I'm sure that someone has explored it for use-cases like Connect already, where the plug-in adds additional complexity and friction to the user experience.

This thread has some suggestions:

question about live streaming screen capture‌

The folks in the FMS form (the thread above will take you there) might have some better suggestions as well.