Allow sharing of individual windows.

[selflein]

Adding the option to share individual windows was discussed in different issues/PRs but there is no corresponding open issue right now.

[selflein]

Some discussion can be found here

[danshick]

True, thanks. Also worth linking to the corresponding wlr-protocols issue, which I would consider a prerequisite/blocker for this feature.

[timsofteng]

Hello. What is a current state of this feature?

[hugopeixoto]

Here's the link to the same issue mentioned by danshick in the new forge: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/issues/93

[tm512]

I'd really like to see a feature like this implemented. My streaming setup on X11 involves having a game in a window on one side of the screen with stuff like terminals and twitch's dashboard on the other side of the screen. Since I'm stuck with a single-monitor setup, I don't have the option of just running the game fullscreen on one monitor and using fullscreen capture, with everything else on the other monitor.

It sounds like some other Wayland compositors like GNOME already provide the ability for single-window capture? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but if that's the case then what are they doing that makes that possible that wlroots doesn't do?

[columbarius]

GNOME/mutter uses a completely different base. There is currently no way to export a toplevel buffer in wlroots. The current roadmap (and take this with a grain of salt is):

1. Finish ext-screencopy
2. Create a way to export handles for toplevels (windows) from the compositor
3. Expand ext-screencopy to accept these handles
4. Expand the chooser protocol to account for them (Create a more extendable chooser protocol #169)
5. Add this together to share window buffers

For the meantime there is #156 to share a region of the screen.

[tm512]

For the meantime there is #156 to share a region of the screen.

Unfortunately specifying the cropping region ahead of time isn't really practical without a way to precisely move and resize a window into that region (like what xdotool can easily do on X11). While things are limited to capturing entire outputs, would it be possible to run the game to be captured inside of a nested wayland compositor running in a window? I'm not sure if its buffer would then be available for capture via xdpw. The ability to set the resolution of the nested compositor would also be important in that case.

If that's not feasible, I've been thinking of just hacking whatever compositor I settle on to keep a tmpfile with a full list of windows and their size/position, then pass those into slurp to interactively select which window to capture, using that with wf-recorder or ffmpeg w/ kmsgrab.

[wallabra]

If that's not feasible, I've been thinking of just hacking whatever compositor I settle on to keep a tmpfile with a full list of windows and their size/position, then pass those into slurp to interactively select which window to capture, using that with wf-recorder or ffmpeg w/ kmsgrab.

@tm512 Another concern is that a window is not always in the foreground, like when using workspaces or a tabbed container in Sway.

[spagootie]

This feature would be great to have, because it's on virtually every platform other than wlroots compositors.