Let me start by saying that I do not know whether this is the best stackexchange site to ask this. I am not directly asking for an opinion on which is best (although obviously it would be appreciated). I just simply need some guidance.
I am wanting to start on a hobby project but its going to be a big old thing so I wanted to start off small. I basically need to know how to stream a video of my desktop (or any desktop) into a WPF application. Future enhancements would include doing multiple displays from different computers on a network into a WPF application.
I have done some research and someone has given me a list of Libraries that I could use avlib, ffmpeg, gstreamer. So I started with the first two and could find ffmpeg however I found people stating that it is better to use libav. But I couldn't find any information on avlib really, is libav a successor to avlib and that is why I can't find it?
Finally all these articles that I were reading were from 2012 as well so I don't know whether there is an even more up to date version. The last release notes for libav were from May this year so my assumption is that this is still being developed.
Any guidance would be really useful as I am not sure where to start looking (even if it is telling me which site would be best to post this on).
For FFmpeg vs. Libav, see this post. Beyond what you'll read there and in the posts linked from there, this is entirely opinion-based. See also this, which is relatively fair although a bit old.
For FFmpeg/Libav vs. GStreamer, this really depends on what type of API you prefer and what special plugins you need that are only available in one or the other. Read docs for both, play with both and see which one suits your needs and/or preferences better.