Screen sharing with WebRTC?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

We're exploring WebRTC but have seen conflicting information on what is possible and supported today.

With WebRTC, is it possible to recreate a screen sharing service similar to join.me or WebEx where:

• You can share a portion of the screen
• You can give control to the other party
• No downloads are necessary

Is this possible today with any of the WebRTC browsers? How about Chrome on iOS?

manpreet 2 years ago

To the best of my knowledge, it's not possible right now with any of the browsers, though the Google Chrome team has said that they're eventually intending to support this scenario (see the "Screensharing" bullet point on their roadmap); and I suspect that this means that eventually other browsers will follow, presumably with IE and Safari bringing up the tail. But all of that is probably out somewhere past February, which is when they're supposed to finalize the current WebRTC standard and ship production bits. (Hopefully Microsoft's last-minute spanner in the works doesn't screw that up.) It's possible that I've missed something recent, but I've been following the project pretty carefully, and I don't think screensharing has even made it into Chrome Canary yet, let alone dev/beta/prod. Opera is the only browser that has been keeping pace with Chrome on its WebRTC implementation (FireFox seems to be about six months behind), and I haven't seen anything from that team either about screensharing.

I've been told that there is one way to do it right now, which is to write your own webcamera driver, so that your local screen appeared to the WebRTC getUserMedia() API as just another video source. I don't know that anybody has done this - and of course, it would require installing the driver on the machine in question. By the time all is said and done, it would probably just be easier to use VNC or something along those lines.