A New Video Protocol Extension Sought For Wayland

Developers at Collabora have proposed a Wayland protocol extension for handling Wayland surfaces that work well for streaming videos.

Frederic Plourde of Collabora explains the proposal as a way for queueing up buffers with presentation time-stamps within the compositor so that video-sink clients can more effectively present the content while being precise with the timestamps for having synchronized audio and video.

The "wl_videocompositor" protocol extension goes on to describe itself as "The global interface exposing video-surface compositing capabilities. The aim of video-surfaces is to support streaming video coming from videosinks that typically need to queue video buffers with presentation timestamps in the compositor in order to accurately synchronize video and audio streams."

Those interested in more developer details on this proposed protocol extension to improve streaming audio/video playback on Wayland can be found via this mailing list thread.