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Is there a software that displays a "window" that shows the contents of another window (an actual window of an app/software)?

I have a lot of windows that I like to monitor constantly, for ex., an IP Cam footage, CPU/Disk usage graph/values, a browser window but only a small portion of it.

I could just rearrange (stack/side-by-side) those windows to all show at the same time but resizing is often messes up the default layouts of some apps, and in some cases isn't even possible.

I want a "preview" of each window but only a small portion of them.

E.g.:

enter image description here

Is there a software that does this?

OS: Windows. License: Any.

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2 Answers 2

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It would probably take some doing to set it up, enough that it would probably only be worth it for a fixed set of windows and it will take a lot of digging through the documentation.

Free Solution

You could use FFMPEG and the built in GDI screen grabber to:

  1. Capture a specific window by title at a specified frame rate, as in ffmpeg -f gdigrab -framerate 30 -i title=Calculator ...
  2. Scale &/or crop the video feed from that window as in ... -offset_x 10 -offset_y 20 -video_size 640x480 ...
  3. You may need to stream each resulting video ... udp://192.168.2.1:6666 using localhost and a different port number for each capture window then
  4. Tile or mosaic the videos from the streams into a new one
  5. Use VLC to "play" the stream.

Note that it may even be possible to do all of the window captures and the mosaic in a single command - you will need to dig & experiment and possibly reach out to the FFMPEG community for the syntax.

Paid for Solution

Unreal Streaming Technologies have a set of components, all with limited/trial versions available that include:

  • UScreenCapure: "After the installation of this component you will be able to stream your desktop window or part of it"
  • UVideoMixerSource: "This filter receives video streams from other source filters installed in the system, and mixes/switches these streams into one output video stream. ... The filter comes with configuration utility where you can configure the exact layout of mixed streams as well as various transforms: crop, resize, transparent blending, chroma key etc.."
  • Use VLC or other stream player to show the stream.
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This feature now exists PowerToys: Crop And Lock

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/crop-and-lock

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