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Xwayland Video Bridge created to improve Linux screen sharing

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With the move between X11 and Wayland still ongoing, and likely won't finish for years, problems keep coming up like screen sharing but XwaylandVideoBridge may help solve this.

This new tool written by Aleix Pol and David Edmundson is designed to allow much easier sharing of screens and windows between X11 and Wayland, which should help to ease the transition from X11 to Wayland. The problem is that currently in the likes of Discord, MS Teams, Slack, Zoom and others that you run through Xwayland, you may end up with a black screen and no windows listed — this should solve it.


Picture credit: David Edmundson

Hopefully in future things like this won't be needed, as everything moves over to Wayland. Still, it's good to have tools available for legacy apps that won't get updated and great for the next few transition years. 

As the developers on it say it should work "on any desktop that supports the Xdg desktop portals and pipewire streaming and have a working system tray".

Read more in the blog post and see it on GitLab.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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24 comments
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GodofGrunts Mar 23, 2023
Nice. I'll probably try this tonight!.
Linas Mar 23, 2023
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Something like that should really be built into Wayland.
gaboversta Mar 23, 2023
I saw their blog pist on this yesterday (my time) and wanted to try it, but didn't geg around to it.

I hope it's good and gets added to plasma6 by default, as considered in the blog post.
usernamer Mar 23, 2023
So this is more of a workaround hack than a definitive solution.
JordanPlayz158 Mar 23, 2023
I would recommend WebCord for the discord specific example but XWayland Video Bridge is better as you don't need independent forks of each app but if there is a FOSS fork and/or implementation of an app that has support for native wayland, I'd say that is the better choice.


Last edited by JordanPlayz158 on 23 March 2023 at 5:16 pm UTC
zany130 Mar 23, 2023
Quoting: JordanPlayz158I would recommend WebCord for the discord specific example but XWayland Video Bridge is better as you don't need independent forks of each app but if there is a FOSS fork and/or implementation of an app that has support for native Wayland, I'd say that is the better choice.

Webcord doesn't support game activities, nor does it support discord mods like better discord.

Used to use both the native client and web cord because of this.

Discord should just really update their electron version and use pipewire sharing 😔
minidou Mar 23, 2023
QuoteThe problem is that currently in the likes of Discord, MS Teams, Slack, Zoom and others that you run through Xwayland, you may end up with a black screen and no windows listed — this should solve it.

works fine here on latest gnome and teams pwa.

I don't understand which case this will help that xdg-desktop-portal-wlr doesn't handle.


Last edited by minidou on 23 March 2023 at 5:40 pm UTC
Eschguy Mar 23, 2023
Does Discord support Wayland on Nvidia yet? It's been the biggest reason I still run X11 these days.
MayeulC Mar 23, 2023
Quoting: LinasSomething like that should really be built into Wayland.

I'm not sure if you mean screensharing or that video bridge? If the former, well, there's pipewire, just not supported by Discord (the "app", it works in browsers).
If you mean the bridge itself, it's difficult while still honoring Wayland's security guarantees, and it would be more a part of XWayland than wayland.

Should it be in XWayland? Maybe, but this modular solution is good as well.
scaine Mar 23, 2023
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This feels like it's doing for apps/windows what OBS does for cameras. Cool idea, but tbh, while hacks like this are needed, and given that so much of my job involves screensharing from various apps/windows... I'm gonna be on X for years to come.

Having said that, I suppose the bulk of my sharing is from Chrome, running O365, so I guess I could experiment a little, since there's Wayland support there already. It really does feel like a lot of extra hassle for security features I won't notice or benefit from anyway (as a single-user system used to browse mainly very trusted sites).
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