Screen Capture
Capture screen contents as live video.
What it does
Screen Capture pulls the contents of a display or a single application window into the graph as a live, updating image. It runs at its own capture frame rate, independent of the graph's playback rate, and reports the image size, whether the capture is active, and an error message if the source it points at disappears.
Display mode grabs an entire monitor; Window mode grabs one picked application window. Both are treated identically downstream, as an ordinary live image.
When to use it
Another app, a browser tab or a second monitor brought in as a texture: screen-share style compositing, VJ overlays, process capture
A live desktop feed straight from the OS, with no capture card
Source health checked from the graph, via the active and error outputs
| Parameter | Type | Default |
|---|---|---|
mode | String | "display" |
display | String | "0" |
window | String | "0" |
fps | Number | 30 |
enabled | Boolean | true |
show_cursor | Boolean | true |
position | Vec3 | (0, 0, 0) |
rotation | Vec3 | (0, 0, 0) |
scale | Vec3 | (1, 1, 1) |
anchor | Vec3 | (0, 0, 0) |
opacity | Number | 1 |
Gotchas
Display and Window are two different pickers. Switching Mode between
displayandwindowdoes not clear the other selection, so confirm the one matching the current Mode points at the source you want.Frame rate here is the capture's own polling rate, not the project's frame rate. Raise it for smoother motion from a fast-moving source, or lower it to save resources on something mostly static.
If the picked window closes or the picked display disconnects, the image feed stops updating. Watch the error output rather than assuming the last frame is current.
Worked example
Add a Screen Capture node. Leave Mode on Display to grab a whole monitor.
Pick the display you want to capture from the Display list.
Wire the image output into a compositing or effect node to see it live.
Switch Mode to Window and pick an application window instead, for one app rather than the whole screen.
Turn off Show Cursor to keep the mouse pointer out of the captured image.
See also
Camera Input · Browser Source · NDI Input · Rasters (images)