Wayland's Weston Now Supports Video Capturing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland's Weston Now Supports Video Capturing

Wayland's Weston reference compositor now has built-in support for video capturing...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEwOTM

[9a3eedi]

That's actually pretty nice. I remember when I was looking for desktop video capture a couple of years ago for X11, and I just could not find a good working solution. It's probably much better now, but still.

I wonder if they could now implement some sort of network transparency with this feature. Something similar to VNC maybe?

Also, this is my first post in phoronix!

[runeks]

So anyone have some videos captured this way? Would love to see one.

[Delgarde]

I wonder if they could now implement some sort of network transparency with this feature. Something similar to VNC maybe?

The article and mailing list post don't provide much technical detail, but I believe their thinking on network transparency is that it would be implemented as a proxying compositor - i.e one that renders to a network buffer instead of a screen - and a corresponding client that talks to the real compositor. Not sure if that's how they've implemented screen recording, but it does seem an obvious similarity...

[Azpegath]

This is great! I tried capturing video with x-capture (or whatever it was called) and the framerate was horrible the second I turned it on. Having Wayland intelligently recording video based on changed/damaged areas sound awesome, compared to a full-screen video recording. Hope to see some examples of this in the near future!

[Ancurio]

As they're trying to keep Weston mostly secure,
they are at the same time (somewhat) forced to now provide special
interfaces for all the common things users have come to expect,
and especially come to expect external programs to do (screenshots, video capture etc.),
while trying to keep everything sealed inside the compositor.

The only problem I see is that while this might me highly convenient for
showcasing a few simple things on a desktop / demonstrate bugs / doing a simple screencast,
once one considers future applications like games, and then most certainly also
people wanting to capture some gaming footage, this lossless capture would
quickly seem inappropriate, as it would immediately fill up any hard drive,
so direct encoding to codec foobar would be necessary.
Also, live-streaming has become popular recently, which would also require another
(although possibly quite similar) interface. In the end, they won't be able
to provide everything for everyone while still keeping the screen data "safe",
which is one of the limitations of Weston I'm already seeing
(a similar "corner case" that popped up earlier was that of input methods).

In the end, it's just a reference implementation though, and there's nothing set in stone
in the Wayland protocol that would forbid a compositor from making its buffer
publicly accessible, which will probably be the default case for desktops.