Wayland Merges New Screen Capture Protocols

Nearly three years in the making, the ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 protocols have been merged into the Wayland Protocols repository for vastly improving screen capture support on the Wayland desktop.

The ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 screen copy protocols build upon wlroots' wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 with various improvements for better screen capture support under Wayland. These new protocols should allow for better performance and window capturing support for use-cases around RDP/VNC remote desktop, screen sharing, and more.

Among the initial implementations for these Wayland protocols are the wlroots library, the WayVNC VNC viewer, and the GRIM Wayland compositor image capturing software.

The ext_image_capture_source_v1 protocol is around opaque image capture source objects between the capturing protocols and image capture sources. The ext_image_copy_capture_v1 protocol is for allowing clients to ask the compositor to capture image sources such as outputs and top level surfaces. That capture protocol then copies them into user-submitted buffers.

See this merge request for more details on these new screen capture protocols for Wayland that were merged on Saturday.