Is there a better way than pointing a camera at a monitor?

[elpasha3000]

Hi everyone,

I've run into an interesting requirement several times over the years and I'm curious how others are solving it.

A customer wants a POS terminal, workstation, dashboard, or control-room display recorded alongside their CCTV cameras inside the same NVR/VMS.

The traditional approaches seem to be:

• Pointing a camera at the monitor
• HDMI encoders
• Capture cards
• Separate screen-recording software

All of them work, but each comes with trade-offs in terms of hardware, image quality, maintenance, or integration.

After running into this problem repeatedly, I started experimenting with a different approach and ended up building a Windows application that exposes a desktop as a standard ONVIF / RTSP camera.

From the NVR's perspective it appears as just another IP camera, complete with ONVIF discovery and H.264 streaming.

The original goal was POS systems, but I can see potential applications for:

• Control room displays
• Manufacturing dashboards
• Warehouse systems
• Training environments
• Digital signage monitoring
• Remote branch workstations

I'm interested in hearing from installers and system integrators:

• Have you encountered this requirement?
• How are you handling it today?
• Would you prefer a software-based approach or dedicated hardware such as HDMI encoders?
• Which NVR or VMS platforms would you expect something like this to support?

I'm mainly trying to understand whether this is a niche requirement or a problem others are seeing as well.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

 

[Phil]

Something like this?

Home

Turn PC into a virtual ONVIF IP camera. Stream PC screens, app windows, webcams & audio to VMS/NVR via ONVIF RTSP. Software-only. Free trial.

www.deskcamera.com

 

[elpasha3000]

Yes, DeskCamera is probably one of the closest existing products to what I'm describing.

I was actually curious to learn how many installers and integrators are using solutions like that in real deployments versus HDMI encoders, capture cards, or other approaches.

My implementation started from a specific customer requirement and evolved into a lightweight native Windows service that presents the desktop as an ONVIF camera for standard NVRs and VMS platforms.

The discussion has been useful because it's shown there are several different ways people are solving the same problem depending on the environment.

For anyone curious, I do have a public beta available and would be happy to hear feedback from anyone willing to test it:

Releases · elpasha3000/Screen2ipcam

Thanks for the link.