A desktop streaming utility based on GStreamer.

This Bash script sets up a GStreamer pipeline that captures desktop video, resizes it to match predefined dimensions, encodes using mpeg2, multiplexes with aac-encoded audio, and sends to a receiver via TCP.

This has been created to watch Netflix and YouTube on Kodi by streaming the desktop of another computer in the network.

The script takes care of creating a fake PulseAudio sink, so the default audio sink is disabled during streaming, and content is streamed at default (maximum) volume.

In order to set up streaming:

• Install dependencies (gstreamer1.0 plus plugins, nc, pulseaudio utils)
• Fiddle with settings in .sh script if you like
• Edit one of provided receiver templates (kodi, mpv) to match host's hostname or IP,
• Run .sh script on host machine
• Open strm / m3u file on receiving machine.

This script deliberately uses old and relatively simple mpeg2 encoder, so the host machine may cope with compressing video without a problem. Compressing video by hardware has been abandoned as it had negative impact on decoding Netflix video that I wanted to watch in the first place.

Thus it is expected to exhibit lag of 2-4 seconds. It may or may not be suitable for streaming outside LAN, I've never tested that.

Once receiver disconnects from the stream, the streaming script ends automatically. It is a side effect of using GNU nc, but let's call it a safety feature.

TCP has been adopted because UDP was dropping packets and corrupting the stream.

All ideas are welcome, just file an Issue.

This work has been heavily influenced by Petter Reinholdsen's blog post:

http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html

Special thanks goes to super helpful @mad_ady and @rooted from Odroid forum. The thread starts here:

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=345531#p345531

This script may cause permanent damage to everything that you love. Get outta here.