Episode: 4004
Title: HPR4004: Wayland to X11 bridge
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4004/hpr4004.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:30:14

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4000 and 4 for Thursday the 7th of December 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Wayland to X11 Bridge.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 5 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Ken found out about X-Prop and X-Wayland video bridge.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public
Radio.
This is an episode in the series, today I learned when I logged in this morning I noticed
that one of my desktops had a small window that square about the size of your thumbnail
on the screen.
I had no idea what it was and I immediately jumped to the conclusion that some lead hacker
had exposed my information about that I realized, well first let's not panic and gather
some information.
I remember years ago there was an application on the Linux that allowed you to identify
what the application was so I was forced to use that as I had tried to close all other
applications and had identified that it was not anything that I personally intentionally
started up on my own.
So there's a program on Linux called X-Prop and it is called the X-Prop property display
for X and the summary says the X-Prop utility is for displaying windows and font properties
in a next server.
One window or font is selected using the command line blah blah blah blah.
So I ran that and when you run that application it will maybe just run it here now.
You run it in the console and then your windows cursor turns to a crosser and when you click
on the application it gives you icons etc etc etc.
So you can use that and then the application will give you X information about it.
So this gives me the window manager underscore name strings which was a willend to X recorder
bridge.
Well what's interesting about this window is that there's no window decoration whatsoever.
It doesn't identify it in the it's not in the taskbar what it is it's not in the window
bar and it has no window decoration, no window frame, no open or closed button.
I was able to drag it to the second screen so it was out of my way but that's all the
information I had.
Any, a bit of I took the willend to X recording bridge which had me a lot less worried because
I'm on Fedora 39 and as a result they're running will and I'm going to fold.
So I assume this was something part of the operating system.
It's a bit of doctor going and I found two articles worth of which are in the show notes.
One is about the application itself on the GitHub it's part of the KDE desktop.
It's an X willend video bridge and the about says it's on the KDE page and let me just
check the license here assuming it's KDE I'm assuming that it is via it's covered on
the BSD CC 0 GPL 2 etc so let's assume it's really broken source it says about by design
X applications count access windows or screen contents for willend clients this is fine
in principle budget breaks screen sharing tools like discord ms teams Skype etc and more.
This tool allows us to share specific windows to X 11 clients but without the control of
the user at all times.
The X willend video bridge all will merge all or case should also start on login.
It will run in the background next time you try to share a window a prompt will appear.
The previous selected window now being available for sharing.
The title will always be willend to X 11 bridge no matter what window is selected.
The system icon provides finer control so it's possibly a KDE thing and the reason there's
no windows decorations problem because I'm running LXQT but that allayed my issues and
the other link will be an article to gaming on Linux which was the X willend video bridge
created to improve Linux screen sharing and it more or less saves the same thing and
gives you a link to their website so that's it that's what I learned today.
Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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