Wayland video conferencing share specific windows

Ask Fedora
,
1

Hi,
in several video conferencing applications I can in principle share screen content. Under wayland, I only seem to be able to sshare complete screens, on xorg I can also share specific windows. This happens to very different video conferencing apps. Thus I presume this is a wayland issue.
Has anybody encountered that and/or have solution?
Cheers!

4 Likes
2

My company uses MS Teams, so I must use it, and it doesn’t work at all on Wayland. Before discovering this issue I tried several tools to use, the only tool that worked for me was jitsi on Firefox, if I used on chrome it didn’t work.
My main problem was to share the entire screen, I had to do a presentation where I was explaining a tool for backup for my team, and I wanted to show them my terminal, I had to logoff and login again using Xorg, and the Teams screen share started working.

2 Likes
3

Unfortunately, this is how Wayland is designed as far as I know. In Xorg, applications can mutually access the content of their windows, which has been considered a security risk, so that behaviour has been prevented in Wayland. Therefore, some screen taking applications do not work and neither does screen sharing in full extent.

I heard screen sharing might be possible in Wayland too, I am not sure now, so let me ask around, but if so, it will have to be done by utilizing some Wayland internal access layer and the applications will need to be adapted for it.

I do not believe any proprietary application like MS Teams will be adapted, so as a workaround, Xorg is your current option.

1 Like
4

This seems to be the future of taking screenshots under Wayland. Application must support this protocol in order to be able to record screens. https://pipewire.org/

5

According to this Screen-sharing in a Wayland Session
The screen sharing support is better via the web browser (mainly chrome) than the app.

I will have a try…

6

So from my experience, With Zoom under Firefox running under Wayland, I could share my entire screen.
The authorization process with Firefox is a little complicated though.

I also tried with chrome, but as it is probably running with Xwayland, I could only share other Xwayland windows. I could not share the entire screen nor application running natively under wayland.

So it is going in the right direction but there is still room for improvment !