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0 pointssp1rit4y ago0 comments

One of the selling points of Wayland is, that they have no such API. An Application is supposed to be unable to access windows (and their corresponding keyboard/mouse input).

One of the downsides this has is the described issue of "screensharing beeing impossible on wayland". This is solved by the XDG Desktop Portal, which provides a unified dbus interface across the different compositor implementations for requesting a pipewire file descriptor (which can be used with gstreamer to get a live video stream of the deskop, in a way far superior to x11 framegrab). However the implementation differs for each compositor, GNOME for example asks you if you what to share the whole screen or just a specific application but wlroots (swaywm, wayfire, etc.) AFAIK automatically accepts and shares the whole screen. I don't know what KDE Plasma does.

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dathinab4y ago

I initially miss read you post, you formulations can be a bit misleading.

E.g. "Wayland is, that they have no such API.", it has screen sharing APIs but they are different and require you do go through other programs like XDG Desktop Portal and Pipewire to allow the user to control such access. Similar this also means Wayland supports screen sharing just in different ways.

Anyway the important parts are:

- the implementation might differ, but the API doesn't (or at least not by a relevant degree)

- wayland requires you to go through specific APIs for screen sharing, scanning processes has little to do with screen sharing on either wayland or X.

account424y ago

> which can be used with gstreamer to get a live video stream of the deskop, in a way far superior to x11 framegrab

I don't think I'd agree that having to go through dbus and pipewire just to get the contents of the screen or a window is far superior to requesting that data from the display server. It certainly adds a lot of complexity with subpar documentation spread across multiple projects. Does this provide you a compressed stream or can you get the raw pixels that are displayed?

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