Simulating Screen capturing as a webcam?

Question

Do we have a way to simulate a webcam driver, that will provide realtime captured screen (30 frames per sec) as it's output?

Answer 1

This is one of several features of ManyCam (free). It is a virtual webcam driver through which you can stream your real webcam video (with optional real-time video effects), video or image files, or your full/partial desktop.

Answer 2

Yes, just google video2webcam. It works quite well and will loop a video or picture as output.

Answer 3

The driver's job is to provide a level of abstraction between the software and hardware. The driver is supposed to issue commands to the hardware. It's not responsible for taking pictures and turning it into an animated GIF for instance. It's going to do low level stuff like, turn the device on and off, send raw data to a socket.

That being said, if you need to create a virtual device driver. Here's an overview of VDD's. Windows Programming/Device Driver Introduction

Generally these are not written in higher-level languages such as C#. Rather, they are written in languages such as C/C++. You will need the KMDF, or Kernel-Mode Driver Framework.

If you just need to access a webcam from a .NET application on a system with a webcam, you just need an API.

Open your browser.. go to google.com and type ".NET webcam API"

You will see something like this:

Webcam in your own application

It appears that this is a wrapper for the DirectShow class.