Blue Iris feed of Desktop screen as Virtual Camera

Recent work using Blue Iris streams for tiles has taken me into an odd discovery. I've no idea what that value is, but it's been fun!
I was able to make 'virtual' cameras - basically a black screen but using a Live Overlay which would allow me to set wget snippets saved into Local folder as items.
Today, I was able to stream a desktop of a computer screen as a camera feed into BlueIris. In turn, I can now place that camera stream as a tile. I can also now call Alexa to 'show [machinename]' which displays as a camera feed on any Alexa device.

A possible use case of this - I was thinking Alexas displaying Zoom meetings, or monitoring workstation screens for security purposes - as I can set a BI trigger on motion. Technically this has little to do with Hubitat, I realize but it's quite cool!

I used both VLC and a 3rd party tool called DeskCamera (trial version). VLC was actually a bit better as I could control framerate.
image

And using the overlay in BlueIris you can overlay a carefully crafted image - a sort of Poor Mans image mask :slight_smile:

I'm more interested in this! :slight_smile:

1 Like

I've got a number of workstations here in my office so it was easy to snag one as a 'source'. I'm using a really old Windows server 2012 running the latest Blue Iris for handling all my cameras around the house and property.
I have had functional 'Alexa, Show backyard' or 'show xyz' and can display any camera in my blueiris directly onto my Alexa Show units. (I've got 5 here - 2 5", 2 8" and 1 10"). Been using this since mid last year. I was recently working on making a useful dashboard, which in turn led me to learning easy ways to make a tile with an Image and put the URL to the BI stream directly onto the tile as a background. Worked perfectly!
One of my cameras has a 'Wunderground.com' weather source. but it doesn't supply a UV or Lumens value. I get that value from another great Hubitat community driver called OpenWeatherMap. I use the Lumens value to send triggers back to the BI server to force the cameras into night or day mode. All of that works great now!
But I wanted to display the UV and Lumens value IN the camera feed with the other weather variables. So I rigged up Rule use the new Beta of File saving on hubitat. I store the value being used for Lumens that I get from the OpenWeather device and write it into a file. Then I use a tool to take that created file off the hubitat and stick it as a BI video overlay. Perfect for my need!
But this led another user into exploring how to overlay Images in BI video. I then got the idea to pull content from websites and use that as overlays on a 'blank' camera screen. Again, Another awesome use for me I'd never thought of!
Finally, I began to explore the idea of creating a camera in BlueIris that was receiving its feed from a VLC stream of one of my workstation desktops. and again, once I got BI to handle, all the rest was downhill work. I can even send triggers from BI to Hubitat if the desktop screen changes.
The last thing I did was create an 'Overlay of an Overlay'. I stacked a screen image of a PNG file with a careful outline and 'blanked out' part of the screen. Having way to much fun!