What’s the future of screen capture on Linux? What’s holding it back? What’s pushing it forward?

A version of this question that might be more accurate/holistic: Do you think there’ll be a standard, high-performance desktop API in our lifetimes?

It feels like there isn’t the same market pressure like there is for Valve and Proton that’ll make a good capture protocol appear. I’d love to eat my words, but I’d also easily bet one trillion dollars^[1] that I’ll be dead before anything dethrones GPU vendor extensions.

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tangential additions / context for the terminally bored:

For example, Nvfbc+Nvenc is a must-have for game streaming with Moonlight and ALVR (not sure if AMD has anything like that), but it’s my poor understanding that this type of GPU-only framebuffer capture isn’t possible on Wayland for security or other reasons, which is sadly keeping me on X11.

Windows probably has awesome screencapture APIs given that the NVIDIA Capture SDK documentation cites it as why they removed Nvfbc from their Window’s drivers but not their Linux drivers.

The proof that Windows reaped the rewards of unifying all their stuff can be seen in the Lossless Scaling-likes that are on the market (Magpie, Integer Scaling, etc.) while all Linux has is like Gamescope and vkbasalt ^[2], so apples and oranges.

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1. Zimbabwean ↩︎

2. super-tangential: I tried to ducttape a Lossless Scaling-like out of nvfbc, using a shader to do closest neighbor scaling. But once I had to truly delve into Xorg, I gave up, as playing Maple Legends was not worth all that effort. ↩︎