Subscriber Discussion

Capture Monitor Output To VMS?

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Sep 13, 2013

I am trying to capture the output from a monitor to a VMS using an encoder at a customer site. The products we found are either the very low-res VGA to NTSC converters (Startech), or the high-end VGA to Ethernet (and expensive) such as Epiphan.

Has anyone done a similar project?

Thank you very much in advance.

JH
John Honovich
Sep 13, 2013
IPVM

I wonder if there was some application that could run on the PC, capture the screen and stream it out with an RTSP feed. Then you could just connect to that.

I do not know the solution here. Hopefully someone has a good idea.

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Ethan Ace
Sep 13, 2013

I believe this could be done with VLC. Give me a few minutes to check and I'll get back to you.

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Ethan Ace
Sep 13, 2013

So the answer is yes, you can do it with VLC media player. You select Stream from the main menu, change the capture mode to desktop, pick RTSP, and hit stream, essentially. Here's a screenshot of a recording of my desktop in Exacq (click for full size):

Problem is, it's going to be pretty CPU intensive depending on what resolution you're running. You can pick stream size which should help, and you can scale it to half size or custom resolutions, too.

Overall, I'd probably recommend a hardware device instead, unless the PC you want to record is high powered.

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Sep 13, 2013

Thank you very much for the quick response. Any hardware solutions you may recommend? For us it may be sufficient to record just a screen region, not the whole output.

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Sep 13, 2013

Can you please tell me which port are you using in the VLC configuration - the default 5544 or other, and Exacq RTSP configuration does not allow specifying a port number.

Thank you very much for yoru help.

U
Undisclosed
Sep 15, 2013

We use an encoder from Marshall where we duplicate the screen to the encoder via HDMI. The encoder can be connected to your VMS. We use Milestone Corporate in this case. Marshall Electronics VS-101 or VS-102.

U
Undisclosed
Sep 15, 2013

As a note, Milestone offers a XProtect® Screen Recorder that connects as a camera at no extra cost. We did not use it in this case for other reasons. The computer running the monitors also controlled another activity unrelated to surveillance so the customer preferred not to install additional software (XProtect® Screen Recorder) on the computer.

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Sep 16, 2013

Bill, thank you very much.

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Sep 16, 2013

Bill, thank you very much. Have you seen an application of this encoder streaming to an Exacq VMS?

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