webdesktop

webdesktop

webdesktop streams an existing KDE Plasma Wayland session over WebRTC. It captures through xdg-desktop-portal and PipeWire, encodes with GStreamer, and uses Pion for WebRTC. There is no X11 capture path or fallback.

Features

• Runtime-configurable VP8, software H.264, and VA-API H.264 encoder profiles
• Low-latency newest-frame pipeline with bounded queues
• Server-defined quality presets with client-side resolution, frame-rate, and bitrate overrides
• Optional Opus desktop audio
• Portal-authorized pointer and keyboard input through libei
• Bidirectional rich clipboard synchronization through the Clipboard portal
• Embedded browser client and WebSocket signaling
• Persistent portal restore tokens for unattended service restarts

Requirements

• KDE Plasma on Wayland
• xdg-desktop-portal with the KDE backend and Clipboard portal v1
• PipeWire
• GStreamer with the PipeWire, base, good, bad, and ugly plugins
• libei

The Nix package supplies the userspace dependencies. The VA-API H.264 profile also needs a working VA-API driver. Desktop audio needs pipewire-pulse.

Run

nix build
install -Dm600 webdesktop.example.yaml \
  "$HOME/.config/webdesktop/config.yaml"
./result/bin/webdesktop serve \
  --config "$HOME/.config/webdesktop/config.yaml"

The first launch opens the Plasma portal prompt. Select a monitor and allow the session to be restored. Then open http://127.0.0.1:8080/.

The service listens on loopback by default. It has no built-in authentication or TLS, so do not expose it directly to an untrusted network.

Documentation

• Deployment and portal setup
• Configuration
• Media and WebRTC architecture
• Embedding the WebRTC transport
• Signaling and data-channel protocol
• Development and releases

License

Webdesktop is licensed under the MIT License. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for bundled third-party notices.