Screen sharing

During Video Calling sessions, hosts use the screen sharing feature in the Agora Video SDK to share their screen content with other users or viewers in the form of a video stream. Screen sharing is typically used in the following scenarios:

Scenario	Description
Online education	Teachers share their slides, software, or other teaching materials with students for classroom demonstrations.
Game live broadcast	Hosts share their game footage with the audience.
Interactive live broadcast	Anchors share their screens and interact with the audience.
Video conferencing	Meeting participants share the screen to show a presentation or documents.
Remote control	A controlled terminal displays its desktop on the master terminal.

Agora screen sharing offers the following advantages:

Ultra HD quality experience: Supports Ultra HD video (4K resolution, 60 FPS frame rate), giving users a smoother, high-definition, ultimate picture experience.
Multi-app support: Compatible with many mainstream apps such as WPS Office, Microsoft Office Power Point, Visual Studio Code, Adobe Photoshop, Windows Media Player, and Scratch. This makes it convenient for users to directly share specific apps.
Multi-device support: Supports multiple devices sharing at the same time. Screen sharing is compatible with Windows 8 systems, devices without independent graphics cards, dual graphics card devices, and external screen devices.
Multi-platform adaptation: Supports iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Web, Unity, Flutter, React Native, Unreal Engine, and other platforms.
High security: Supports sharing only a single app or part of the screen. Also supports blocking specified app windows, effectively ensuring user information security.

This page shows you how to implement screen sharing in your app.

Understand the tech

The screen sharing feature provides the following screen sharing modes for use in various scenarios:

Screen Sharing Functionality

Share the entire screen: Share your entire screen, including all the information on the screen. This feature supports collecting and sharing information from two screens at the same time.
Share an app window: If you don't want to share the entire screen with other users, you can share only the area within an app window.
Share a designated screen area: If you only want to share a portion of the screen or app window, you can set a sharing area when starting screen sharing.

Screen sharing modes are available on different platforms as follows:

Desktop (Windows and macOS): Supports all screen sharing features listed above.
Mobile (Android and iOS): Only supports sharing the entire screen.

Prerequisites

On the Android platform, please ensure that the user has granted screen capture permission to the app.

Ensure that you have implemented the SDK quickstart in your project.

Implement screen sharing

This section introduces how to implement screen sharing in your project. The basic API call sequence is shown in the figure below:

Screen Share Process

Choose one of the following methods to enable screen sharing according to your scenario:

Call startScreenCapture before joining the channel, then call joinChannel [2/2] to join the channel and set publishScreenCaptureVideo to true to start screen sharing.
Call startScreenCapture after joining the channel, then call updateChannelMediaOptions to update the channel media options and set publishScreenCaptureVideo to true to start screen sharing.

The flow diagram and implementation steps in this article demonstrate the first scenario.

Integrate screen sharing plug-in

Screen sharing in the Agora Video SDK is implemented through a plug-in. You can automatically integrate the plug-in through Maven Central or manual import of the aar file.

Automatic integration

When integrating the SDK through Maven Central, add dependencies by modifying the dependencies field in the /Gradle Scripts/build.gradle(Module: <projectname>.app) file as follows:

dependencies {
// Replace x.y.z in the following code with the specific SDK version number. You can get the latest version number from the release notes.
def agora_sdk_version = "x.y.z"
// If the value above contains $ signs, use "" instead of ''.
// Choose one of the following blocks:
// Integration solution 1
implementation "io.agora.rtc:full-rtc-basic:${agora_sdk_version}"
implementation "io.agora.rtc:full-screen-sharing:${agora_sdk_version}"
implementation "io.agora.rtc:screen-capture:${agora_sdk_version}"
// Integration solution 2
implementation "io.agora.rtc:full-sdk:${agora_sdk_version}"
implementation "io.agora.rtc:full-screen-sharing:${agora_sdk_version}"
}

Manual integration

Copy the AgoraScreenShareExtension.aar file from the downloaded SDK to the /app/libs/ directory.
Add the following line to the dependencies node of the /app/build.gradle file to support importing aar files:

_1implementation fileTree(dir: "libs", include: ["*.jar","*.aar"])
Ensure that the file libagora_screen_capture_extension.so exists in the jniLibs folder of your project. If it does not, copy it manually from the downloaded SDK folder.
Add the following code to the /Gradle Scripts/build.gradle(Module: <projectname>.app file to specify the location of the JNI library:

_8android { _8 // ... _8 sourceSets { _8 main { _8 jniLibs.srcDirs = ['src/main/jniLibs'] _8 } _8 } _8}

Set up the audio scenario

Call setAudioScenario and set the audio scenario to AUDIO_SCENARIO_GAME_STREAMING (high-quality scenario) to improve the success rate of capturing system audio during screen sharing. This step is optional.

Enable screen capture

Call startScreenCapture to start capturing the screen and set the following parameters according to your application scenario:

captureVideo: Whether to capture system video during screen sharing.
captureAudio: Whether to capture system audio during screen sharing.
captureSignalVolume: The volume of the captured system audio.
width: Specifies the width in pixels of the video encoding resolution.
height: Specifies the height in pixels of the video encoding resolution.
frameRate: Video encoding frame rate (FPS).
bitrate: Video encoding bitrate (Kbps).
contentHint: Content type of screen sharing video.

// Set parameters for screen capture
screenCaptureParameters.captureVideo = true;
screenCaptureParameters.captureAudio = screenAudio.isChecked();
screenCaptureParameters.audioCaptureParameters.captureSignalVolume 
  = screenAudioVolume.getProgress();
screenCaptureParameters.videoCaptureParameters.width = 720;
screenCaptureParameters.videoCaptureParameters.height 
  = (int) (720 * 1.0f / metrics.widthPixels * metrics.heightPixels);
screenCaptureParameters.videoCaptureParameters.framerate 
  = DEFAULT_SHARE_FRAME_RATE;
engine.startScreenCapture(screenCaptureParameters);

Publish a screen sharing video stream in a channel

Call joinChannel [2/2] to join the channel. Set the options parameter to publish the captured screen sharing video stream as follows:

ChannelMediaOptions options = new ChannelMediaOptions();
options.clientRoleType = Constants.CLIENT_ROLE_BROADCASTER;
options.autoSubscribeVideo = true;
options.autoSubscribeAudio = true;
// Do not publish camera-captured video
options.publishCameraTrack = false;
// Do not publish microphone-captured audio
options.publishMicrophoneTrack = false;
// Publish screen-captured video in the channel
options.publishScreenCaptureVideo = true;
// Publish screen-captured audio in the channel
options.publishScreenCaptureAudio = true;
// Join the channel with the channel media options set above
int res = engine.joinChannel(accessToken, channelId, 0, options);

Set up a screen sharing scene (Optional)

Call the setScreenCaptureScenario method to set the screen sharing scenario and choose the screenScenario that best fits your application from the following:

SCREEN_SCENARIO_DOCUMENT(1): Document scene
SCREEN_SCENARIO_GAMING(2): Game scene
SCREEN_SCENARIO_VIDEO(3): Video scene

engine.setScreenCaptureScenario(Constants.SCREEN_SCENARIO_VIDEO);

Update screen sharing

If you want to update the screen sharing parameters, such as the video encoding resolution, frame rate, or bitrate, call updateScreenCaptureParameters to modify the parameter values. This step is optional.

engine.updateScreenCaptureParameters(screenCaptureParameters);

Stop screen sharing

Call stopScreenCapture to stop screen sharing within the channel.

engine.stopScreenCapture();

Limitations

Be aware of the following limitations:

After turning on screen sharing, Agora uses the resolution of the screen sharing video stream as the billing standard. Please see Pricing for details. The default resolution is 1280 × 720, but you can adjust it according to your business needs.
Due to Android performance limitations, screen sharing does not support Android TV.
When using screen sharing on Huawei mobile phones, do not adjust the video encoding resolution of the screen sharing stream during the sharing process to avoid crashes.
Some Xiaomi phones do not support capturing system audio during screen sharing.
On Android 9 and later, to avoid system termination when the app is backed up, it is recommended to add the foreground service permission: android.permission.FOREGROUND_SERVICE to the /app/Manifests/AndroidManifest.xml file.
Screen capture is only available for Android API level 21 (Android 5) or later. On earlier versions the SDK reports error codes ERR_SCREEN_CAPTURE_PERMISSION_DENIED(16) and ERR_ SCREEN_CAPTURE_SYSTEM_NOT_SUPPORTED(2).
Capturing system audio is only available for Android API level 29 (Android 10) or later. On earlier versions, the SDK reports the error code ERR_SCREEN_CAPTURE_SYSTEM_AUDIO_NOT_SUPPORTED(3).