FastGrab

Fastgrab is an opensouce high frame rate screen capture package. A typical capture frame rate at a resolution of 1080p on a modern machine is ~60 fps. There are several other such packages in the wild that are opensource as well, but none of them is as fast or provides a simple way of obtaining the captures image as a numpy array out of the box. The default behavior of fastgrab is to provide the user with the image as a numpy array. Beyond that the user is free to manipulate the image since the pixel data is accessible via a fast and flexible array, i.e a numpy array.

Typical capture frame rate on a modern machine

resolution	fps
360p	> 800
720p	260
1080p	200
4K	20

Usage example

  from fastgrab import screenshot
  # take a full screen screenshot
  img = screenshot.Screenshot().capture()
  # >> img is a numpy ndarray, do whatever you want with it
  # (optional)
  # e.g it can be displayed with matplotlib (install matplotlib first)
  from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
  plt.imshow(img[:, :, 0:3], interpolation='none', cmap='Greys_r')
  plt.show()

Getting Started

Fastgrab was initially developed in 2016 as part of an aimbot (for quake live). Fastgrab is developed and tested on linux. As far as the pre-requisited listed below are satisfied, it should work as expected on windows and osx. The low-level API of Fastgrab is implemented using the cpython, Numpy and X11 C APIs.

Comparison with other packages

The following comparison has been done a Intel i7-6700HQ with 16 GB ram at a 1080p resolution. fastgrab is designed to be fast and does not provide any features beyond capturing the screen, unlike the other packages mentioned in the comparison below that do many great things.

package	fps
fastgrab	200
python-mss	180
autopy	34
pyautogui	8
pyscreenshot	4

to benchmark fastgrab run the script examples/benchmark.py

Prerequisites

• python >= 3.6 (python 2 is not supported)
• Numpy >= 1.15
• gcc >= 4.8.5
• X11 => 1.20

note that fastgrab could work with lower versions but I have not tested it (and probaby will not).

Installing

Fastgrab can be installed in several ways:

pip install fastgrab

pip install git+git://github.com/mherkazandjian/fastgrab.git

git clone https://github.com/mherkazandjian/fastgrab.git
cd fastgrab
python setup.py install

Running the tests

Execute the following in the source root dir

pytest tests

or

pip install tox-pipenv
pipenv install
tox

Contributing

Submit a pull request or create an issue if you find any bugs.

Any help/pull requests that implement support for the following are welcome:

• python 2.7
• osx
• windows

Authors

• Mher Kazandjian - Github

License

This project is licensed under GPLv3

Acknowledgments

• pyscreenshot
• autopy
• pyautogui
• reame template taken from: PurpleBooth
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69645/take-a-screenshot-via-a-python-script-linux/16141058#16141058
• python-mss