XWayland Screencapture

[coderkalyan]

Hi, I saw this: #4412

But would it be possible for xwayland to implement a compatibility layer from X11's screencapture to the screencopy shell (https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/blob/master/unstable/wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1.xml)? I don't know enough about xwayland to know how it would be implemented, but it seems doable without too much effort...

Discord is by no means the only application which has this problem, and it will take many more years before many popular applications (both open source and proprietary) implement native wayland support. For instance, OBS requires a plugin to make screencasting work, and it would be nice to have native translation.

[progandy]

Maybe create a new virtual output (#5216), start wf-recorder with a pipe target and use ffplay to stream it in an x window on the virtual screen? That is not the most efficient path, but it might work.

A better application would connect to wayland and fetch dmabufs directly with wlr_export_dmabuf_unstable_v1 and then plumb them into a gstreamer pipeline with an X11 vaapisink.

[coderkalyan]

@progandy Thanks for the tips, but I'm looking for something that doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge on the side of the user to configure, it should work out of the box. If this can be achieved with the gstreamer setup you were mentioning, could you explain in more detail how this would be setup by the compositor?

[emersion]

This is an Xwayland issue. Xwayland probably won't implement any screen-capture stuff because of security implications.

[progandy]

could you explain in more detail how this would be setup by the compositor?

I can't. My gstreamer-dmabuf knowledge is superficial at best.