Recording the screen

Question

Hi, I ve been given an interesting project to complete at university. It basically involves making a screen recorder, this program will record everything on the monitor and save it to a compressed video file, probably DivX or WMV. I was after some general guidelines from anyone as I have never worked on anything similiar to this. Also how do I "link" in the appropriate codec to compress what I am recording? Any basic guidelines or advice would be really great. Thanks for your interest and help Cheers Nick