Screen sharing with WebRTC?

webrtc screensharing
Crashalot picture Crashalot · Nov 29, 2012 · Viewed 24.1k times · Source

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?

Answer

Sam Dutton picture Sam Dutton · Nov 30, 2012

The chrome.tabCapture API is available for Chrome apps and extensions.

This makes it possible to capture the visible area of the tab as a stream which can be used locally or shared via RTCPeerConnection's addStream().

For more information see the WebRTC Tab Content Capture proposal.

Screensharing was initially supported for 'normal' web pages using getUserMedia with the chromeMediaSource constraint – but this has been disallowed.

EDIT 1 April 2015: Edited now that screen sharing is only supported by Chrome in Chrome apps and extensions.

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