Comment by satellitemx

> I've tried to feed screenshots to ffmpeg and other tools, and it's just... unusable. It works, but consumes way too much resources.

Did you try to use the hardware encoder? Modern computers have chips to accelerate/offload video encode/decode. Your 2019 Mac has Intel GPU for H.264 and HEVC hw encoder, also it has an T2 co-processor that can also encode HEVC video. If you don't supply specific encoders (with _videotoolbox suffix on Mac) via -c:v then ffmpeg will default to sw encoder, which consumes CPU.

> how to scan the screen and send only parts of the screen that have been updated

You'll be reinventing video codecs with interframe compression.

> Also, curious to hear about video encoding efficiency vs 60x JPEG creation. Is it comparable?

I see that you are comparing pixel by pixel for each image to dedupe and also resizing the image to 1280px. Also the image has to be encoded to JPEG. All of the above are done in CPU. In essense you implemented Motion JPEG. Below is a command to allow you to evaluate a more effecient ffmpeg setup.

ffmpeg \

-f avfoundation -i "<screen device index>:<audio device index>" \ # specific to mac

-an \ # no audio

-c:v h264_videotoolbox \ # macos h.264 hardware encoder -r 1 \ # 1fps

-vf scale=1920:-1 \ # 1920px wide

-b:v 2M \ # 2Mbps bitrate for clear and legible text

out.mp4 # you may want to setup a RTMP server so that ffmpeg can transmit the encoded video stream to and allow visitors to view the video