Screen sharing — Windows

You can publish a stream that uses a video view of your screen (instead of a camera) as the source. A client connected to the session can subscribe to the stream (and view it), just as they would subscribe to a stream that uses a camera as the source.

This topic includes the following sections:

Publishing a stream with a screen-sharing source

To use the device's screen, instead of a camera, as the video source, you will need to implement a custom video capturer.

Here is a simple example that defines a custom video capturer to implement screen sharing (using the screen instead of a camera as the video source):

Set the VideoSourceType property of the Publisher object to OpenTok.VideoSourceType.Screen. This flags the published stream as having a screen-sharing video source (instead of a camera).

By default, scalable video is disabled for screen-sharing streams. You can enable scalable video for screen-sharing streams using the Publisher.Builder.ScalableScreenshare property. Note: scalable video for screen-sharing streams is a beta feature.

Determining the video type ("screen" or "camera") for a stream

The Stream object contains a VideoSourceType property. This can be set to one of the following values, defined in the OpenTok.VideoSourceType enum:

  • Camera — a standard video stream that uses a camera as the video source
  • Screen — a screen sharing video stream
  • Custom — a stream published by a web client using an HTML VideoTrack element as the video source

Subscribing to screen-sharing streams

You can subscribe to a stream that uses a screen-sharing video source in the same way that you subscribe to a stream that uses a camera as the source. See Subscribing to streams.