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Time to let the cat out of the bag. I've been working on a new app to use your #Linux phones and tablets as secondary wireless "side displays" (not mirrors). This is based on #GStreamer, x264, #Mutter APIs, and low-latency UDP streaming, and will be designed to work on both ARM and Intel, regardless of hardware acceleration support. (Testing on a #librem5) This is still at an early stage, and will take some time to become usable. Thoughts and feedback? 25 comments
@FOSSingularity Thanks! I designed it primarily for tablets, but sadly don't own any good one to test it with :( I was also thinking of adding a "2x" button to automatically tell Mutter to toggle 2x scale factor on the virtual sink to prevent the having to do so in Display Settings manually  @tuxdevices This looks horribly cool!! Love how it's a few pixels too large for the Librem's screen ๐๏ธ @gregorni Thanks! Don't worry, that's a stylesheet issue but any newer version will make sure to fit even on smaller screens :D @tuxdevices I love the sidecar feature on Mac which sounds like the same thing as this. Since I work a lot while traveling itโs easy to bring my iPad and use it as a second display. It does lose connection a lot though, which is a hassle. Would love to see this on Linux. But make it easy to restart :) @amalgam_ Thanks! Restarting a stream here is simply done by toggling the "connected device" button twice (I did it this way so far when it lost connection)  @tuxdevices Who needs Apple? Just get a linux phone :blobcatgoogly: Also, do you ever plan to make a version that works on Android (idk if it's even possible, but i want to know) @guihn288 An Android release would be possible, but require a totally different codebase sadly (e.g. for MDNS APIs, streaming and so on). If you can copy the GStreamer pipeline to an Android client, however, you can use the "Manual Connection" button to stream to it @tuxdevices Sounds cool! Is this based on Miracast? Also Mutter API's, does this mean it won't work on #PlasmaMobile or #SXMO? @bart No, it's pure GStreamer and UDP - which in the demos so far made it much faster than Miracast in terms of latency. It only works on Mutter because there is no standard "virtual monitor creation" API among desktops, and most desktops do not support this feature aside from Sway ("headless backend") and maybe KDE. If someone wants to expand it to other WMs, it is mostly a matter of expanding its small DBus library to support more DBus interfaces to other desktops.  @tuxdevices is there any way to use something like xdg-portals to not have this be gnome exclusive? (Am not currently using gnome, and dont intend to) @4censord There is no standardized virtual sink API sadly, and not all WMs support it. This works on all architectures (as gstreamer can fall back on software-based h264 even if no hardware support is enabled) @tuxdevices very nice! i wish there was a standard api to create virtual displays... maybe we could add one to xdg-desktop-portal   @tuxdevices I had that idea some years ago, it's so cool to see this! Never made an attempt as I just came up with it based on X11 functionality, which I was already on way to move away from. Do you think this will be somewhat easily portable to termux (or even perhaps a dedicated Android app for F-Droid)?  @tuxdevices This is so cool !!! @tuxdevices Oh-ho! I wouldn't use it a lot, but I would use the heck out of it on certain occasions. Very cool!  @tuxdevices you should make it termux-compatible so we have a good way to do this on android as well |
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@tuxdevices
Interesting idea; It would be neat if shells like gnome or phosh knew to display the app launcher or pre-set windows that suit the smaller display better.
I think this will be *really* useful with tablets specifically! (I can see people with a tablet setup as a second portable monitor for sure).