WPF and DWM for redirecting output over the network

Question

Im writing a large WPF app (large as in screen res), running with some basic controls, basic video playing, etc...

I have been researching how to broadcast/redirect the WPF window to other monitors over a local network. In essence, trying to show a select region of the WPF app on seperate monitors in real time.

I have been reading about the DWM (which I have no experience with) and it seems that the thumbnail API would be a good way to do this. Just broadcast segments (say 9, 300x300 segments) over the network via some sort of multi-cast network broadcast, that client PC's listen for and render...

Can this be done? How would one go about doing something like this?

EDIT

I have been doing some more reading on the DWM, and it does seem likely that this can be achieved, this link explains that:

You can have a distributed rendering of a 3D scene and have it running with full hardware acceleration on any number of client machines.This architecture allows the DWM to provide first-class support for Remote Desktop scenarios

I just dont know where to start looking into this kind of development... any idea?

Answer 1

Can you do this using the DWM thumbnail API? probably not, the thumbnail API is very limited and doesn't give you access to the actual image.

Can this be done in general? Yes, there are a lot of programs that transfer screen captures over a network (like Remote Desktop and VNC).

But is this the best way to do this?

You need a program to broadcast the screen images and another program to draw it - so why don't you broadcast the underlying data and do the visualization on the client side?