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The following script allows you to create a capture of a window in memory and read information from that window as opposed to reading it from the screen. Reading from the screen is not only unreliable (overlapping windows) but it is also slower. Also, the window doesn't need to be visible in order to get a capture of it, but it cannot be minimized.

Download: Display.ahk

Functions in v0.1:

And other functions mainly for internal useage.

Also provided is a shell function to read text (Display_ReadArea), but it is without any mappings. Therefore it won't read anything as-is (you must provide the mappings).


Also, besides specifying colors in BGR format, you can also use any of the following:

Sounds promising.
Would you mind to advise the crowd that you've commented the script in detail within the code. That might be of help/interest for those who won't be able to catch its concept on-the-fly.
Thx for listening & for sharing it.
Keep things going.

Really promising!

I haven't tested it yet but it looks like it can capture frames from a webcam or any other video source too. Or maybe from another user session.

But as I see you save the bitmap pixel-by-pixel so it is not a fast one.

Ahh yes, I forgot to mention that the details of which each function does, as well as well as a description of each parameter is in the source code.

Now it should be know

I haven't really tested it much other than normal application windows that I use it for so I don't know if that will work or not.

This script doesn't "save" anything, it just creates an image of a window in memory from which information can be obtained. I use it to test if a button is in a certain state or is visible and whatnot as well as to read numbers from a window that can otherwise not be obtained (window paints its own buttons or text etc...)

The Display_ReadArea function was 5x faster when using the window capture method as opposed to reading the pixels directy from the screen...

Does this read any text or just the characters "$.,0123456789"?

If just those characters, is there a way to make it read normal text (a-z) as well?

Thanks.

Hi there,

Thanks for your code - it really helped me understanding a lot of things about GDI...
Still I got some problems with it -

what I'm trying to do:
I want to make screenshots of a certain window every ** minutes and save these images as *.png.
This kind of works, except:
- The code I'm using doesn't make a shot of the actual window, but of the desktop at the window coordinates. So if this window isn't the top/active one, the images I get are from the windows overlapping the one I want.
- Sometimes the screen area seems to be messed up - although I'm giving the right coordinates (nL, nT, nW, nH), they sometimes(!) don't seem to fit...

I think my problem either lies in the definition of hDC or mDC, not sure so...

I also tried to create the hBM not as CompatibleBitmap but as CreateDIBSection, but the result is absolutely the same, CreateCompatibleBitmap just seems to be the easieer way. Instead of your "PrintWindow" I'm using "BitBlt" as shown in this thread (http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic18146.html) to copy the color values - this could of course be the reason for mixing up coordinates, but I looked all commands up in the MS GDI help, and it seems to be used the right way...
I know the window doesn't have to be minimized, but I thought just being in the back should work (another funny bug is, when part of the window is off the screen - then the image is all black).

Sorry for bothering, just can't figure it out on my own...
Thanks for your help!

How do I get "OutputVar" from this code to a MsgBox?

Hello,

I got this link as answer to this post:


How can this be achived with the code above?

Thanks a lot in advance !

Cheers.

You can try DirectX API to get the content of a minimized window.

Hi,

I've been using the Display.ahk and it works great. I just have one question (and I can't seem to find the answer by searching) on allocating the memory that gets passed. Currently I'm using it as follows:



The script works, but I think it's slowly leaking memory as things tend to slow down after many hours.

Do I need the first 3 lines of that code? Or should I be allocating / freeing memory in some other way before passing to CreateWindowCapture?

Thanks for any help!!!

Trying to get a pixel using this code.



However the MsgBox returns 0 instead of the BGR color.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Did you ever get this sorted??? I also think (certain) its leaking memory as I am checking about 16-20 items every second and can see the memory used climb up slowly until the computer is unusable.

It is directly related to this code.



Any help?

leaked memory for me too a while back

Thanks for letting me know its not an isolated problem.

Anybody any ideas on how to fix this??