[HN Gopher] Show HN: Multi-display screen sharing with CoScreen
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Show HN: Multi-display screen sharing with CoScreen
Good to be back on HN with all-new CoScreen, a little more than 3
years after it launched over here! With CoScreen 5.0, you can now
share your windows from multiple displays at the same time, a long
standing request by our most avid users and impossible in other
apps. It also has a lightning-fast, Rust-based window compositing,
scaling, and streaming engine now. CoScreen was always meant to be
different so that you and your team can share your screens
simultaneously and multi-directionally, and to be able to control
what is being shared. We saw it as a natural extension and closely
coupled with your OS -- instant, fast, and seamless. A better way
to pair program, debug tough incidents, or jam on great ideas by
sharing multi-modal information like code, commands, graphs, or
logs. All that made a lot of sense conceptually but to be frank,
it was hard to get it right. Now a part of Datadog and with major
parts of our app rewritten in Rust, we feel we're closer than ever.
Here's what pair programmers liked about CoScreen, so we made it
even better: - High definition code sharing: Windows are video-
streamed in real-time at their native resolution whenever possible.
You never have to search for your IDE anymore or be anxious to
share the wrong window. - Multi-directional collaboration: You can
share, while Alice shares, while Bob shares. Side-by-side, across
multiple displays. With built-in crisp audio and video chat. -
60FPS+ super smooth mouse pointers. Type, click, and draw on any
shared window as if it was your own. What some of you did NOT
like, so we fixed it in CoScreen V5: - CPU utilization and latency
have been reduced drastically as various parts of our desktop
client are now implemented in Rust, building on crates such as cxx,
rust-skia, iced, as well as Neon for our native remote control
plugins. - No more accidental clicking into remote windows through
the new remote window toggles. - You're no longer bound by your
displays, can share windows from multiple of them at the same time
and even move them across displays while sharing without stopping.
- You'll also soon be able to join meetings from your browser from
any platform. CoScreen runs on macOS (x64 and Apple Silicon),
Windows, soon also on the web and is currently free. We're planning
to charge for larger teams and enterprise features in the future.
Hopefully - finally - we'll also have a Linux version one day. Tell
us if you need it urgently and if you have any other requirements!
Author : coscreen
Score : 279 points
Date : 2023-03-31 13:51 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.coscreen.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.coscreen.co)
| zamadatix wrote:
| I know this is probably not part of your core direction with the
| product since it seems to be more focused on collaboration or
| being a better screenshare type tool but I can't help but mention
| this is extremely close to being a far superior Synergy/Mouse
| Without Borders/Input Director alternative where rather than just
| let the mouse/keyboard go between machines you can let the
| windows teleport as well.
| thedracle wrote:
| Jason Thomas, former CoScreen CTO here.
|
| I am an avid Synergy user, and what they have accomplished in
| terms of direct mouse/keyboard input synchronization is very
| impressive, and I use it on a daily basis.
|
| I can say however, it's very different than CoScreen and what
| CoScreen seeks to achieve, and is performed in a technically
| different manner.
|
| CoScreen injects mouse interaction and keyboard presses
| directly into a window on OSX (if it isn't a weird type of
| window like an emulator, or something that captures and handles
| input on a very low level).
|
| Synergy simulates mouse movements/events directly over windows,
| interfering with the position/location and current state of the
| remote cursor. It's much more like a remote mouse-driver for a
| lack of a better comparison.
|
| In many ways this is more performant, simpler, and works on a
| wider variety of windows right out of the box.
|
| On another level it interferes more with remote users, and
| prevents multi-player collaboration.
|
| I definitely could see us producing a mode that is LAN focussed
| and which provides synergy like behavior, but the current
| remote collaboration is really geared from a UX perspective
| around multi-player in CoScreen.
| alanfranz wrote:
| Since nobody quoted that already, I've been quite happy with
| Drovio, a competitor that supports Linux as well. Will be happy
| to try this out though!
| coscreen wrote:
| Sounds good, let us know what you think!
| geethree wrote:
| This is pretty neat, yearning for Linux though.
|
| That said, why is datadog going this route? Maybe their more
| recent incident management stuff?
| coscreen wrote:
| 100%! Incident response is one of our key use cases as many of
| our users connect on CoScreen to debug and solve complex issues
| using different Datadog products and other dev tools. Please
| drop your name on the waitlist for Linux and we'll follow-up!
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| evanmoran wrote:
| Looks great. Congrats! I'm curious, what is your tech stack for
| implementing audio and video chat?
| thedracle wrote:
| We are using WebRTC for both Audio/Video and screen sharing.
|
| The Audio/Video are using VP9 SVC, and are a pretty typical
| configuration, using Jitsi as the backend.
|
| The screen sharing is accomplished via a combination of
| libwebrtc and native Rust.
| davbryn wrote:
| How are account permissions handled on the host machines that are
| relinquishing control to outside users? I mean, what prevents a
| Malicious user pasting in a devastating command into your
| terminal if they are running under your privileges? Or a mistaken
| user copy and pasting a bad command?
| DANmode wrote:
| What's preventing the coworker helping you over your shoulder
| from entering a malicious command?
|
| Some human issues can't be solved with technology.
| coscreen wrote:
| Good question - If you share your window or display on
| CoScreen, you can decide if you also want to share remote
| control or not. It's a global toggle for all the windows you
| share. Also, only users who have the invite to your CoScreen
| (and therefore have a secure token to get into it) and are with
| you in it at that moment, would be able to type into your
| window if you allowed that.
| kxrm wrote:
| It would be nice to set control settings from the host on a
| per window basis.
| taway2023-03-31 wrote:
| I work spacecraft operations (Mars) and I wonder if you have
| considered targeting that industry. We screenshare all day every
| day, and we use Webex. It's been getting steadily worse. First
| they removed native linux support (have to use web browser), then
| they broke our high-resolution sharing so we can only share low-
| res, and then they started breaking their multi-display features.
| coscreen wrote:
| Extraterrestrial collaboration is our speciality! Jokes aside,
| send me a note at till@coscreen.co as I'd like to see how we
| can help.
| nerdbaggy wrote:
| If you contact your Cisco rep you can open a ticket for your
| org to have HD access again.
| juli1pb wrote:
| I started to use the product recently and I love the product
| CoScreen. Still a few bugs but it's definitely better than Zoom
| to collaborate between developers!
|
| edit: Also, please add Linux support!
| coscreen wrote:
| If you see any issues, please submit them through the post-
| session feedback dialog or to hello@coscreen.co. We're
| responding to every single report.
| djtango wrote:
| First I've heard of this and am glad others realize screen
| sharing and video conferencing are not a commodity just yet.
|
| Curious how this compares with Pop (of screenhero lineage)
| mrleinad wrote:
| Is there a way to share a portion of the screen if I want to? Or
| is it just entire windows?
| coscreen wrote:
| Currently only entire displays and specific windows (one or
| multiple of them). But happy to look into this - what would you
| share only partially for example?
| rkagerer wrote:
| I do this all the time in Zoom, to share PowerPoint
| presentations at the correct scale and without exposing my
| speaker notes, and to share YouTube videos from Firefox
| without showing the "chrome" portion surrounding the video.
|
| My side monitors are oriented vertically, so if I put those
| windows in fullscreen and try to share the whole monitor it
| doesn't come out correctly proportioned. This also provides a
| smoother experience without the "flicker" of going fullscreen
| and back (which can happen when you switch focus between
| windows).
|
| It's a similar use-case to the one bentcorner described
| above.
|
| The "share region" solution is admittedly a bit of a hack but
| it works. Love to find an easier solution to this scenario
| (especially a way to break out speaker notes into a floating
| window I could position right under my webcam).
|
| BTW apropos to nothing, I always loved the way the old Spy++
| tool let you drag a reticle onto a control hWnd (reminiscent
| of how "Select an Element" works in Chrome DevTools) - that
| was a neat mechanism to quickly select a perfectly carved out
| region of an app without having to draw a box, but alas these
| days with so many going Electron, and other non-standard
| presentation surfaces, it wouldn't be as useful anymore.
| mrleinad wrote:
| Specifically, I have a 49" ultrawide monitor and a VM in it.
| If I share the entire VM, other people with smaller monitors
| see it too small and have to zoom. If I resize the VM, I have
| to reposition my windows inside it.
|
| It's easier to share a portion of the screen, it's what I do
| in Zoom. A portion of a window would work too.
| seinfish wrote:
| Max here from CoScreen. I'm with you, sharing a portion of
| the screen or window would be very useful for this
| scenario. I can also imagine running CoScreen from the VM
| itself, but that would only work for Mac and Windows VMs at
| this point (Audio and video could still go through your
| physical machine ---- i.e. you would connect with two
| users). We also have a headless Linux client in the
| pipeline that could serve to connect the VM directly.
| mrleinad wrote:
| Connecting with 2 users would work. I would still need to
| resize the window I'm sharing (the reason I have that big
| ass monitor is to use VS maximized and have everything
| open), but it's easier than resizing all windows.
| [deleted]
| bentcorner wrote:
| I do this using OBS + a dummy plug on my GPU (I run Windows).
|
| 1. My dummy plug "monitor" is to the top right of my main
| ultra-wide - I do this so it's impossible to get "real" windows
| into it.
|
| 2. I have a scene in OBS that has the display capture of my
| main desktop as a source, and top/left align it with the
| window.
|
| 3. I set my output to 1920x1080 (1366x768 works too but it's a
| little too small).
|
| 4. I set the resolution of my dummy plug monitor to 1920x1080.
|
| 5. I use PowerToys FancyZones to set a 1920x1080 zone on the
| top left of my ultrawide main monitor that I can snap windows
| to if I shift+drag windows.
|
| Workflow:
|
| In a meeting I make sure to start OBS, and do a Fullscreen
| Projector of that scene to my dummy plug monitor. (You can add
| another scene + display capture of your dummy plug monitor if
| you want to ensure everything looks identical). I then snap
| whatever window I want to the 1920x1080 zone. I then share my
| dummy plug monitor to the meeting.
|
| That way you can share what looks like just a window in your
| meeting but also have the capability to move other windows into
| the "view" for others as discussion continues and you need to
| pull other things up without any awkwardness of re-sharing.
|
| This whole setup would be a shitload easier if I could use some
| kind of simple "transparent window" app and then share that app
| to the meeting. Or if Teams had "share a region" functionality.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Yea this is kinda nutty as a solution. How often does it
| break?
| avodonosov wrote:
| This product is probably the answer to my Ask HN four years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17738724
| coscreen wrote:
| We hope so, remote pair programming is/was hard. Let us know if
| you see ways how to make it even better!
| mandeepj wrote:
| With this post, I just learnt about the CoScreen's acquisition.
| Congrats to them! Not sure if it was Acquihired or acquired.
| coscreen wrote:
| Thanks a lot!
| todd3834 wrote:
| If the product still exists and is being iterated on I'd
| consider that an acquisition.
| DANmode wrote:
| GP is curious about the results for the team, not the
| product.
| jensenbox wrote:
| Sounds awesome but can't touch it until it has Linux support. I
| am on the waitlist. Fingers Crossed.
| seinfish wrote:
| Max from CoScreen here. Yeah, we hear you. We have a web client
| coming out soon and a headless client that works on Linux in
| the pipeline. Hope to bring some early users onboard for the
| latter in Q2.
| hartator wrote:
| Do we know how it compares to https://pop.com/?
| burningion wrote:
| I got to use this internally when I was at Datadog. It really is
| a great flow / experience for collaboration. Congrats to the team
| on the launch / shipping. (And yes, make Linux please!)
| simianpirate wrote:
| Another vote for Linux support. I'm on Linux about 85% of the
| time.
| coscreen wrote:
| Got it, please drop your name on the waitlist and we'll get
| back to you!
| coscreen wrote:
| Thanks a lot! We will...
| digitalsanctum wrote:
| +1 for Linux
| abdrehman wrote:
| +1 for linux
| asabla wrote:
| I haven't heard about CoScreen last month. But last week we had a
| team which needed a solution for mob programming and I couldn't
| find a solution which had enough functionality to meet their
| expectations.
|
| And now I've seen multiple posts and recommendations in a very
| short time.
|
| Haven't had the time to test it properly yet, but so far I'm kind
| of surprised I wasn't recommended or found CoScreen earlier.
|
| Keep up the good work! there needs to be alternatives
| coscreen wrote:
| Thanks a lot, we've just come out of private beta and the
| rewrite again so glad you found us now. Let us know how it
| goes!
| nonane wrote:
| Congrats! Looks quite good. Will be trying it out. How have you
| reduced CPU utilization besides moving to Rust? Are you using
| hardware accelerated encoding?
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Looks cool, but how is this better / different from just doing
| this on Zoom? I'm already using zoom daily for meetings and
| occasionally use screen sharing and once in a while use their
| "request screen control" feature, and it works great. No
| complaints, and no new tool needed in addition to my regular
| video meeting tool.
|
| Not at all hating on this tool. It really looks nice, but I'm
| just trying to understand if there is a reason to use it instead
| of / in addition to zoom.
| ayewo wrote:
| Pairing programming.
|
| If pairing is a huge part of your culture at work, the higher
| resolution screen sharing makes all the difference as you don't
| have to squint or strain your eyes while reading code.
| seinfish wrote:
| Max from CoScreen here. Yes, we've heard this from many users
| as well. Generally speaking our approach to this is: 1. Deal
| with capturing and rendering of this in the native layer to
| achieve high performance and throughput. 2. Use something we
| call "DPI-match" to open shared windows at the right size on
| the receiving end to avoid unnecessary text blurring from
| pixel count mismatch. 3. Give the screen sharing stream high
| priority.
| coscreen wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. We have a few Zoom-converts and here's
| what they've told us they like about CoScreen: 1. Every user
| has their own mouse pointer instead of sharing the same. 2. You
| can share bi-directionally, so not just one at a time. 3. More
| importantly, if I share two or three windows with you, they
| appear as three separate native windows for you and you can
| resize and position them as you like without interfering with
| me instead of being stuck in a black box.
| philsnow wrote:
| > and you can resize and position them as you like without
| interfering with me
|
| Does this resize the window only locally, like scaling a
| video? If somebody shared a browser window with me
| demonstrating a responsive web site, could I drag the bottom
| right corner of the window around to see how the site
| reflows?
| drunkan wrote:
| I think perhaps this is a little more developer and creatives
| focussed as opposed to business meeting focussed al la zoom and
| I suspect and it's inferred from what they've focussed on
| (optimization, multi screen, 60fps) that this will be more
| performant than zoom. That said I am yet to try it but zoom is
| pretty much down there at the bottom of screen sharing tools I
| would want to use daily... There wasn't much mentioned about
| security but again it's probably more secure than zoom
| rcarmo wrote:
| I suppose Wayland would be one of the reasons Linux is held up?
| robertkrahn01 wrote:
| Hello! We are still planning on Linux support but, to be
| honest, have had our hands full with supporting macOS and
| Windows. There are a surprising number of things to do and edge
| cases (multiple displays, spaces, full screen behavior, non-
| invasive event injection, etc). There are no specific technical
| issues holding us back really.
|
| We are currently working on a headless client that will also
| work on Linux. We do not have exact dates for a release yet but
| it (and a full client) is on our roadmap. IT WILL happen.
| Fingers crossed.
| hkwerf wrote:
| Not sure whether this comment is regarding screen sharing in
| wayland in general, but this has been working smoothly in most
| applications for quite some time via xdg-desktop-portal:
|
| https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.free...
| coscreen wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, we'll get to it
| xeno42 wrote:
| Congrats on 5.0 - CoScreen has been an integral part of our
| team's daily workflow for the last couple of years, and it's been
| wonderful to to be able to share feedback and see the product
| evolve into a better and better tool.
|
| Having to share screens occasionally via Zoom feels so slow and
| clunky by comparison to the single-click ability for multiple
| people to share and interact with windows concurrently as the
| conversation flows. Can't imagine going back!
| coscreen wrote:
| Glad you stuck with us from early on!
| lanstein wrote:
| We <3 CoScreen!
| bee_rider wrote:
| Zoom became the de-facto screen sharing app and it sucks, so so
| bad.
|
| Wish I hadn't missed Coscreen during the lockdown, and now I
| don't really have any need for it, but going to keep the link
| in my back pocket in case it is ever needed. Looks slick. Sort
| of like x2x but with a thought out interface...
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Hey! This looks awesome! Let me ask I did not see any pricing or
| any license info on the site. I was wondering what the pricing
| for this would look like for a team? Are you planning on keeping
| it free?
| coscreen wrote:
| Thanks! It's currently free but we're planning to charge for
| larger teams and enterprise features further down the road.
|
| Our current plan: https://coscreen.co/pricing (feedback
| welcome!)
| spockz wrote:
| We are a pretty large org and especially for major incident
| resolution I see coscreen work. However, in order for it to
| be used during majors the software should be readily
| available for the engineers. On the other side I can also
| imagine being challenged why we would need to pay seats for
| all our users.
|
| Will there be an option for something like floating licenses
| or being billed after the fact?
| judge2020 wrote:
| The main issue I see is Single Sign-On being gated behind
| enterprise pricing, and a "please contact our sales team"
| option no less. Big enterprises can happily pay whatever you
| ask for SSO, but this mainly hurts the medium-sized
| businesses that only set up SSO if it's convenient; if it
| costs a lot more, they'll settle for the reduced security of
| username+password auth. If anything, supporting the big 3
| identity providers (Google, M365, and Okta) on the Pro plan
| would be better than charging to have any form of SAML/SSO.
| https://sso.tax/
|
| Also, do you have plans to offer a discount or donated
| version for nonprofits?
| chime wrote:
| Second this. SAML/SSO is less of an enterprise feature and
| more of an onboarding escalator. Even startups with 3 devs
| use SSO now.
| coscreen wrote:
| Good catch, this got actually much easier for us to do
| recently as you can now sign in with SSO through Datadog.
| So if you sign up to Datadog with any SSO provider, you
| should be able to login to CoScreen with just two clicks.
| We corrected that on our pricing page as well.
| philsnow wrote:
| From a different perspective, SSO is an offboarding
| guardrail.
|
| I worked at a company that used Slack before they had SSO
| working. One person left the company and there was
| speculation as to reasons etc on various slack channels.
| Two or three weeks later, they piped up with one more
| "goodbye" in a public channel... and then actually signed
| out.
| coscreen wrote:
| See our separate comment on SSO through Okta, this is
| actually available out of the box through login with
| Datadog and we've corrected the pricing page. Thanks again
| for the pointer.
|
| We'd like to keep CoScreen affordable for those teams and
| are planning to factor it into the pricing model once we
| put one in place. Drop me a mail if you have specific
| requirements (till@coscreen.co).
| DANmode wrote:
| > Free until July 2023
|
| So at that point will the application/service only work for
| 1:1s again?
|
| How specifically would that work, before I go falling in
| love?
| seinfish wrote:
| Max here from the CoScreen. I think the best way to put
| this is that there will still be a gracious free tier to
| help small teams get their work done and this will likely
| be metered on the number of users joining a session at the
| same time. Once a paid upgrade is available, we want you to
| feel it's worth it though :-).
| pyrox420 wrote:
| Honestly the feedback I'd have is the pricing is a bit high.
| I'm sure you've done the competitive pricing analysis so I'm
| not going to preach. :) But with the sprawl of tools we
| already pay for that "get us close" to what coscreen does,
| it'd be a hard sell to get another tool.
| tedyoung wrote:
| I'd love to replace Zoom, but as a trainer/coach, I use it
| only on a weekly basis with multiple people, I guess you'd
| call them "strangers" (though they might be "regulars"). I'm
| unclear about how the pricing works in this situation, i.e.,
| what does CoScreen consider a "user"?
| sjcoles wrote:
| Wow this looks amazing. I am eagerly awaiting a Linux version. We
| have ~150 Linux desktops and training or collaborating via one
| sided google meets can be limiting.
| coscreen wrote:
| Amazing! Please leave your details on the Linux waitlist so I
| can follow-up once we get there
| coscreen wrote:
| Link: https://teamcoscreen.typeform.com/to/jOdHZB5d
| Zekio wrote:
| Is there a "hopefully done by date?" for the linux version?
| thedracle wrote:
| For a full blown Linux client, we haven't yet set that
| date.
|
| We are working on a headless Linux client that will allow
| you to stream first pty/terminals, and then windows, into
| a CoScreen from Linux systems.
|
| It's going to be a very small utility, and we hope to
| provide access to it by May/June.
|
| This will eventually evolve into a full blown client.
|
| In the meantime we will have a web client which will work
| on Linux released shortly, it's currently being privately
| tested within DataDog.
| drunkan wrote:
| Interesting - I had not come across coscreen before but I can see
| straight away how much better that would have been to use than
| any of slack, teams or discord all of which I've used previously
| for pair programming/on boarding etc. I could see value here also
| in brainstorming sessions where previously collaborating on a
| google doc etc.
|
| I haven't delved into what the pricing model is but presumably it
| won't be free for 1on1 use forever but I can easily see the
| business subscription model working perhaps well enough for
| individuals to have free 1on1.
|
| Like many of us here big appreciation for the write up as opposed
| to video I think I got a good idea of how it worked and it's key
| selling points just from the text and screenshots.
| coscreen wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words, glad it was useful.
| selflesssieve wrote:
| Jitsi Meet
| coscreen wrote:
| Big fans! Jitsi powers a large part of our backend.
| thedracle wrote:
| We're good friends with the Jitsi guys, and I have worked with
| Jitsi for many years now.
|
| Here is a interview I did of Emil Ivov, the founder of the
| Jitsi project:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nODpF8JjHE
| dirtsoc wrote:
| What is the pricing model for this? I don't see any mention of
| cost anywhere on the site at first glance. When you download the
| gif shows a "Get CoScreen for Free" button.
| coscreen wrote:
| Thanks! It's currently free but we're planning to charge for
| larger teams and enterprise features further down the road.
|
| You can find our current plan here: https://coscreen.co/pricing
| (feedback welcome!)
| jayd16 wrote:
| The UX of it looks really good. I wonder if this works for
| something a bit more video heavy than IDEs and text editors. Has
| anyone tried this with video editing, modeling, or game engines?
|
| How would this fair sharing an IDE and the Unity editor at the
| same time? Anyone have any experience with that?
| coscreen wrote:
| We have not tried Unity ourselves but would be eager learn more
| about the use case. We've heard from a few users who use it to
| play games together.
|
| Because the sharing approach is video-based, it can stream any
| kind of content, no matter if text or moving images. That being
| said, it takes some resources to shovel 4k images with a lot of
| changes from A to B so it needs some free capacity to run
| smoothly.
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(page generated 2023-03-31 23:00 UTC)