New OBS Plugin Offers Game Capture Solution on Wayland (for Vulkan renderers)

One of the issues cropping up in the migration from Xorg to Wayland is the desire to capture part or all of your screen for recording and/or streaming to others - in many cases, applications designed for Xorg simply capture a black screen, with few workarounds.

However, for games and applications that can run with the Vulkan API, there's a new plugin from David Rosca (nowrep) for OBS Studio called obs-vkcapture (OBS Plugin Forum | GitHub) that aims to work around the issue and get your gameplay ingested directly, bypassing the built-in Xorg 'Window Capture'.

Bonus - it should even work under Xorg, provided you have a new build of OBS with EGL support and pass it the environment variable:OBS_USE_EGL=1

Similarly, you'll need to run your game (or other Vulkan application), one at a time (e.g. in your Steam launch options), with:OBS_VKCAPTURE=1

Now, this is a very new development (nowrep's initial commits here are barely 4 days old as of writing), but in my initial testing last night, I managed to play a 4 hour session of 7 Days to Die (using the experimental Vulkan backend), while streaming and recording it just fine.  That said, I did compile and install it by hand myself, on a git master build of OBS, and it is of course still under active development, so the usual caveat holds here: Your Mileage May Vary.

Still, they're looking at potentially adding OpenGL support in the future, so this is definitely one to watch.