Ubuntu 22.04

Question

18

Screen sharing with Wayland

rated 0 times [ 18] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 31778 / 3 Years ago, mon, may 31, 2021, 3:38:03

How is the status of screen sharing on Wayland? Recently this has become an essential topic for people who telecommute.

I am trying to share my screen on Google Chrome 88 with WebRTC and I run GNOME 3.36 with Wayland with the following packages:

pipewire 0.3.11

xdg-desktop-portal 1.8.0

xdg-desktop-portal-gtk 1.8.0

I tried to setup everything from scratch with the following steps:

Build the packages with autotools and install the required dependencies along with their .pc files for pkg-config

Copy the .so shared libraries for pipewire to /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu and run ldconfig to refresh the config

Copy the unit files in /usr/local/lib/systemd/user for systemctl and start the services

With everything correctly installed, I enabled chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer and tried this demo and it says "Success!" but I only see a black screen...

EDIT: It looks like the problem has been fixed as of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I tried on a Thinkpad X1 laptop, with the default installation and I was able to share my screen on the demo link above.

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1 Year ago

answered 3 Years ago antebrow · Accepted Answer

Ubuntu 22.04

Support may be working out of the box, but I did not have all the needed packages on upgrading from 20.04.

I was able to have screen sharing working with the following:

(!) if this breaks your audio, see this bug

sudo apt install xdg-desktop-portal-gnome gnome-remote-desktop

And reboot if necessary (or see Troubleshooting section).

YMMV, but for sure pipewire-media-session (dependency of gnome-remote-desktop) and xdg-desktop-portal-gnome are needed and were not installed by do-release-upgrade from 20.04.

After that I was able to validate screensharing with dpkg/snap/flatpak apps as follows:

Firefox snap

The default Ubuntu 22.04 firefox (snap) uses wayland by default, and supports WebRTC screensharing (test eg with this WebRTC experiment)

Unfortunately some software (Hello M$ Teams) "blacklists" firefox currently.

Chrome wayland dpkg

Chrome 99 is still X11 by default (despite the support flags being available since April 2021), so start it with

google-chrome-stable --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland &

And to make it permanent, copy+edit /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications/

You also need to enable the WebRTC PipeWire support flag (chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer).

[ portal in chrome ]

It still suffers from the "double" portal issue discussed in WebRTC/Chromium Updates In 2020, but it's usable.

Kooha flatpak (screen recorder)

sudo apt install flatpak

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

flatpak install io.github.seadve.Kooha

flatpak run io.github.seadve.Kooha &

[ portal in Kooha ]

Troubleshooting

Commands that can replace rebooting:

systemctl --user enable pipewire-media-session

systemctl --user start pipewire-media-session

systemctl --user restart xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Relevant Arch wiki

wlroots' "It doesn't work" Troubleshooting Checklist

background: Flatpak portals - how do they work? by Peter Hutterer.

tip: run apps from command-line and check output for error messages like Error creating screencast session: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: No such interface “org.freedesktop.portal.ScreenCast” on object at path /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop -- which means that you don't have a portal implementation -- e.g. this is the expected dbus setup as seen with d-feet:

If you see org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.gnome has some interfaces but not the ScreenCast one, it can mean a missing pipewire setup, or that xdg-desktop-portal-gnome was not restarted to pick it up.