u/elbasha3000

[removed]

For years I've seen the same workaround whenever someone wanted a POS screen, dashboard, control-room display, or workstation recorded alongside CCTV footage:

Point a camera at the monitor.

It works, but it always felt like a hack.

You end up dealing with glare, viewing angles, readability issues, camera positioning, and often a surprisingly poor record of what was actually displayed on screen.

After running into this requirement a few times, I ended up building a small Windows application that makes a desktop appear as a standard ONVIF/RTSP camera.

The NVR sees it as another camera and records it alongside the rest of the surveillance system.

I originally built it for POS terminals, but it seems equally useful for:

• Control room displays
• Manufacturing dashboards
• Digital signage monitoring
• Warehouse systems
• Remote branch workstations
• Training environments

Now I'm trying to figure out whether this solves a real problem or whether I'm the only one who's bothered by cameras pointed at monitors.

For those managing surveillance systems or large fleets of PCs:

How are you handling this today?

Would you rather have the screen show up as a camera in the VMS/NVR, or is the traditional approach "good enough"?

A customer wanted their cashier screen recorded by the same NVR that records their security cameras.

Not screen recording software.

Not remote desktop.

Not a second monitor.

An actual ONVIF camera stream that appears in the NVR beside the cameras.

After discovering the usual solution involved HDMI encoders and extra hardware, I decided to see if Windows could simply pretend to be an IP camera.

A few months later, it can.

The desktop becomes an ONVIF / RTSP camera.

The NVR discovers it automatically and records it like any other camera.

Now I'm wondering:

Is this a niche problem that only a few people have, or have others run into the same thing?

What's your current workaround?

A customer asked me a question that sounded simple:

"Can my POS screen be recorded by the NVR just like the security cameras?"

At first I thought there had to be an easy solution.

Turns out the usual answers were:

• HDMI encoders
• Capture cards
• Extra hardware
• More cables
• More points of failure

It felt ridiculous that a modern PC couldn't simply present its own screen as an IP camera.

So I spent the last few months building exactly that.

The result is a Windows application that turns a desktop or POS screen into a standard ONVIF / RTSP camera that can be added directly to an NVR.

No HDMI encoder.
No capture card.
No extra hardware.

The NVR just sees it as another camera.

Current use cases I'm testing:

• POS terminals
• Control room dashboards
• Training rooms
• Digital signage monitoring
• Recording operator workstations
• Remote branch monitoring

I'm curious:

Have you ever needed to record a screen inside your surveillance system?

If so, how are you doing it today?

I'd genuinely like to hear what solutions people are using and whether this would actually be useful in production.

(If anyone wants to beta test it, let me know and I'll share the build.)