Hi,
On November 26th I (Unity8), Kevin Gunn, Chris Gagnon (Autopilot) and
Alexandros Frantzis (Mir) had a meeting on the requirements and
implementation of screenshotting and screencasting.
Chris told us that what autopilot really wants is screencasting (not
screen shots) as it records all that happens during a test case and
publishes the resulting video in case of failure.
Kevin came with the point that application developers already want
screenshotting and screencasting and therefore the solution should also
cater to them (as opposed to having a solution that works for autopilot
now and for other/third-party applications to be done only later).
Thus considering those requirements and the future mir architecture
(using qt scenegraph), that's the implementation we agreed upon:
Unity8 would provide a D-Bus service for clients (applications,
autopilot) to request for a screencast or screenshot. In case of a
screenshot, the requestor would just provide a filename (or directory)
where the screenshot(s) should be placed and unity8 would do it. For
screencasts unity8 would provide a shared memory area to the requestor
that would be kept up to date with the contents of the screen. Access to
that shared memory area would be controlled with a semaphore and a
mutex. So the problem of handling codecs, recording and audio stream to
go along with it, etc is left to the user (i.e. an actual screencasting
application or tool).
D-Bus was chosen because access control to the screenshot/screencast
feature can be easily implemented using D-Bus security policies.
According to Alexandros, Mir probably won't have to be modified for
screen[shotting|casting]. As a QQuickWindow will be controlling the
composition now (qt-scenegraph approach), what would have to be done is
calling glReadPixels right after the scene graph is rendered, which is
essentially how "QImage QQuickWindow::grabWindow()" is implemented (if I
understood its code correctly).
So that's where I'm heading with the implementation (didn't start yet).
If someone has a better idea, sees a problem with this approach or
otherwise has something to add, please advise.
Feedback already received so far:
Thomi Richards:
- Clarified that autopilot also wants screenshots.
- Asked for a command line tool that does all the work of talking to
that proposed screencasting API and outputs an ogv.
Michał Sawicz:
- "I'm not sold on the idea that it's unity8's / unity-mir's
responsibility to provide that interface, though, as the ability to do
those feels like a very generic need that should be built into the
display server itself. Maybe the fact that we might be using Qt's
scenegraph changes something here, though - but maybe that just means
there's a new project growing on unity-mir's side?"
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