#OBS STUDIO WINDOWS 10 UI FREEZE HOW TO#
#OBS STUDIO WINDOWS 10 UI FREEZE SOFTWARE#

PipeWire here is responsible for negotiating and exchanging buffers between the video producer (GNOME Shell, Plasma, etc) and the consumer (here, OBS Studio). Remember that I vaguely mentioned above that the screencast interface returns a video stream? This video stream is actually a PipeWire stream. Portals are also implemented by important Wayland desktops, such as GNOME, KDE, and wlroots, which should cover the majority of Wayland desktops out there. It’s merely a bunch of D-Bus calls after all. It is perfectly possible to use portals outside of a Flatpak sandbox, and even when running it as a Snap or an AppImage. It is important to notice that despite born and hosted under the Flatpak umbrella, portals are mostly independent of Flatpak. At most, Xwayland will give you an incomplete capture of some (or no) applications running through it. The insecure nature of X11 allows applications to completely bypass this interface, but naturally it doesn’t work Wayland. With this interface, sandboxed applications can ask users to select either a window or a monitor, and a video stream is returned if the user selects something. The portal that we’re interested in here is the Desktop portal, which provides, among others, a screencasting interface. For example, the Document portal allows applications with limited access to the filesystem to ask the user to select a file the user is then presented with a file chooser dialog managed by the host system, and after selecting, the application will have access to that specific file only, and nothing else. Portals are D-Bus interfaces that provide various functionalities at runtime. PipeWire & Portals to the Rescue!Īn interesting byproduct of the development of apps sandboxing mechanisms are portals. This was the last missing piece of the puzzle to implement a Wayland-compatible capture. This API is being documented and will freeze and become stable soon, with the release of OBS Studio 27, so make sure to check if and see if there’s anything wrong with it! Like many other DMA-BUF APIs, it is pretty verbose since it needs to handle multiplanar buffers, but I believe this API is able to handle pretty much anything related to DMA-BUFs. Exchanging DMA-BUFs is essentially about passing a few ids (integers) around, which is evidently much faster than copying dozens of megabytes of image data per second.įortunately for us, this particular feature also landed, introducing a new function gs_texture_create_from_dmabuf()which enables creating a gs_texture_t from DMA-BUF information. I wrote about this in the past, but the tl dr is that implementing a monitor or window capture using DMA-BUFs means we avoid copying buffers from GPU memory to RAM, which is usually the biggest bottleneck when capturing anything.

#OBS STUDIO WINDOWS 10 UI FREEZE HOW TO#

An important step, but not very useful without a way to capture monitors or windows.Īfter that, the next step was teaching OBS Studio how to create textures from DMA-BUF information. OBS Studio running as a native Wayland client. It took some time, but eventually the 3 big pull requests making OBS Studio able to run as a native Wayland application landed.

Making OBS Studio work on Wayland was a long road indeed, but fortunately other contributors attempted to do it before I did, and my pull requests were entirely based on their fantastic work. That’s why, instead of creating a fork or just maintaining a plugin, I decided to go the long hard route of proposing everything to OBS Studio itself.

#OBS STUDIO WINDOWS 10 UI FREEZE SOFTWARE#

But free and open source software allows us to do that! Fortunately, not only OBS Studio is distributed under GPL, it also is a pretty popular app with an active community.

Sadly our hands are tied when it comes to proprietary apps, there’s just no way to contribute. The built-in screen recorder of GNOME Shell already works, but most importantly, we need to make sure applications are able to capture the screen properly. This required some work throughout the stack: from making Mutter able to hand DMA-BUF buffers to PipeWire to improving the GTK desktop portal to creating a plugin for OBS Studio to fixing bugs in PipeWire it was a considerable amount of work.īut I think none of it would matter if this feature is not easily accessible to everyone. I’ve been blogging sparsely about my quest to make screencasting on Wayland a fluid and seamless experience for about a couple of years now. As of today, I’m happy to announce that all of the pull requests to make OBS Studio able to run as a native Wayland application, and capture monitors and windows on Wayland compositors, landed.

Obs studio windows 10 ui freeze