Emmanuele BassiOct 15, 2023
This is utterly horrific holy fuck
Show threadeladOct 15, 2023
@ebassi this basically reads "hello I'm writing malware plz help"
Show threadEmmanuele BassiOct 15, 2023
@elad either that, or it’s a case of somebody working in a terrible environment
Show threadCassidy James   Oct 15, 2023

@ebassi @elad I can actually see the use for this in another context (and have considered designing something like it): a timelapse app for artists.

In this context, their “work” is their art, not something imposed by an employer.

It should probably be built into the drawing app or whatever, but I could see the niftiness of a workflow timelapse that captures the various apps you use and whatnot over a long period of time, without having to sit and record an actual video of the entire process.

Show threadCassidy James   Oct 15, 2023
@ebassi @elad that said, I think such an app could actually just request the screen share portal and then only actually capture an image every minute or however often?
Show threadIan Douglas ScottOct 15, 2023

@cassidy
@ebassi @elad
If you only need one frame a minute, I think with screencast you'd still have a pipewire stream producing frames at a normal framerate, and just be ignoring most of them? So not a very resource efficient solution, if that matters

(I think you may be able to negotiate a framerate of 1/60 fps over pipewire if both ends support it, but I don't think implementations typically would.)

Show threadIvan Molodetskikh

@ids1024 @cassidy @ebassi @elad mutter negotiates max framerate. If the other side wants low fps it will only record and send low fps. Currently minimum-capped at 1 fps in the code though.

It has to do it because it has to set the regular fps property to 0 to mean "variable framerate".

Oct 16, 2023 at 2:44amWeb
Show threadIan Douglas ScottOct 16, 2023

@YaLTeR @cassidy @ebassi @elad
It looks like framerate in Pipewire is indeed an `spa_fraction`, so I think it is possible to negotiate a framerate of 1/60 fps or whatever. And then have the client fallback to a higher rate if the desktop environment doesn't support that.

So yeah, seems like a viable solution. Probably not hard to add support for in gnome-shell if it already can negotiate fps with a minimum of 1.

Show threadIvan MolodetskikhOct 16, 2023
@ids1024 @cassidy @ebassi @elad yeah, just need to lower that minimum fraction a bit, then a client negotiating a low max max fps (yes those are two maxes) should just work, assuming there's no bug in mutter's scheduling