Capture video data from screen in Python

Question

Is there a way with Python (maybe with OpenCV or PIL) to continuously grab frames of all or a portion of the screen, at least at 15 fps or more? I've seen it done in other languages, so in theory it should be possible.

I do not need to save the image data to a file. I actually just want it to output an array containing the raw RGB data (like in a numpy array or something) since I'm going to just take it and send it to a large LED display (probably after re-sizing it).

Answer 1

There is an other solution with mss which provide much better frame rate. (Tested on a Macbook Pro with MacOS Sierra)

import numpy as np import cv2 from mss import mss from PIL import Image  mon = {'left': 160, 'top': 160, 'width': 200, 'height': 200}  with mss() as sct:     while True:         screenShot = sct.grab(mon)         img = Image.frombytes(             'RGB',              (screenShot.width, screenShot.height),              screenShot.rgb,          )         cv2.imshow('test', np.array(img))         if cv2.waitKey(33) & 0xFF in (             ord('q'),              27,          ):             break 

Answer 2

With all of the above solutions, I was unable to get a usable frame rate until I modified my code in the following way:

import numpy as np import cv2 from mss import mss from PIL import Image  bounding_box = {'top': 100, 'left': 0, 'width': 400, 'height': 300}  sct = mss()  while True:     sct_img = sct.grab(bounding_box)     cv2.imshow('screen', np.array(sct_img))      if (cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xFF) == ord('q'):         cv2.destroyAllWindows()         break 

With this solution, I easily get 20+ frames/second.

For reference, check this link: OpenCV/Numpy example with mss