Java- screen capture behind the application.

Question

Is there a way to capture the screen but without the app itself getting shown. I know how to minimize or make a frame invisible but this has to be done real fast cos it's going to happen alot in each second (at least once every second). I want it to look something like the magnifier in Windows Vista/7. (The app can see behind itself.)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This is not possible in Java without tight native integration with the window-manager of the platform in question.

Answer 2

Call setVisible(false) on your main JFrame before capturing the screen. When the screen capturing process is finished, call setVisible(true) to get your GUI showing up again.

To capture the screen, you can use the Robot class. It contains a createScreenCapture method that receives rectangle coordinates which will be captured in a BufferedImage.