Wayland Gets Hardware-Accelerated Screen Capturing

The DRM compositor back-end for Wayland's Weston now has a patch that provides hardware-accelerated screen capturing support by using VA-API with drivers that support this video decode/encode acceleration mechanism.

With X.Org right now, screen capturing can be choppy and a pain, but with Wayland/Weston it can show off new possibilities by tapping the VA-API library with the DRM compositor back-end for offloading the intensive process to the GPU. Intel's Ander Conselvan de Oliveira published a patch on Friday for providing this support.

Right now though the support is a bit buggy for at least Intel Sandy Bridge graphics and there's some other matters to work through in improving the process. With a simple key sequence, an H.264 video of the captured screen contents can be dumped and then muxed to other formats using GStreamer. Only the DRM compositor is supported right now as the implementation allows it to bypass a copy when submitting the front-buffer to libva.

The patch with more than one thousand lines of new code can be found for now on the wayland-devel list.