peerspeak/docs/screenshare-integration.md

Screen-share integration (peerspeak ↔ pixelpass)

Design decisions for surfacing pixelpass screen-sharing from inside a peerspeak room. Locked 2026-06-06; not yet implemented. peerspeak owns voice, pixelpass owns pixels — this doc is the seam between them.

Core principle: mutually optional, runtime-only coupling

Neither tool is a Cargo dependency of the other, in either direction.

• peerspeak works fully without pixelpass installed; the screen-share control just degrades (greyed / "needs pixelpass — install it").
• pixelpass works fully without peerspeak; nothing here makes it require voice.
• The integration is runtime subprocess + a stable contract, never a crate import. The contract peerspeak depends on is pixelpass's CLI flags + JSON event stream, treated as a public API.
• Keep the contract symmetric so the reverse direction (pixelpass launching peerspeak for a "call these viewers" button) stays possible later. No master/slave assumption.

Chosen approach: B — auto ticket-exchange over peerspeak's gossip plane

1. User clicks Share screen in a peerspeak room.
2. peerspeak spawns pixelpass --host --output json as a child process (video only — see audio decision below).
3. peerspeak scrapes the {"event":"ticket","value":"..."} line from the child's stdout (emitted once at host startup).
4. peerspeak broadcasts a new typed gossip message, ScreenShareOffer { from, ticket }, over the same gossip plane that already carries chat + presence.
5. Each peer's peerspeak shows " is sharing — [View]".
6. Clicking View spawns pixelpass <ticket> --output json as a viewer; it opens in its own pixelpass window (not embedded in iced).
7. When the sharer stops, peerspeak kills the host child and broadcasts a ScreenShareEnded { from } (or equivalent) so viewers' indicators clear.

Rejected: A (manual ticket via chat — barely integrated) and C (deep embed / shared iroh identity — large, fights pixelpass's window model and the two-tools philosophy).

Why this is cheap

pixelpass was built to be driven as a child process:

• --output json exists explicitly for a front-end (its own --gui re-execs pixelpass --host --output json and parses the stream). See pixelpass/src/common/output.rs.
• Host emits: ticket, host_info, viewer_joined, viewer_left, capture, viewer_refused. Viewer emits: connected { url }. Host reads a kick command on stdin.
• The ticket is the capability. The data-plane host (serve.rs) gates viewers only by max_viewers — there is no friends-list ACL on the stream (friends is a separate control-plane/presence concept the headless CLI ignores). So distributing the ticket over gossip = granting room access, with no ACL to fight.
• pixelpass is 1 host → N viewers (asymmetric), which maps cleanly onto "I share, the room watches."

Locked sub-decisions

• Audio: video only on the room-launch path. Do not pass pixelpass's audio capture, so screen-share audio can't echo/double with peerspeak's voice mix.
• Separate window for the viewer (pixelpass's own), not embedded in iced.
• Binary discovery: look up pixelpass on $PATH; allow a config override for a non-standard location. Absence is a normal, handled state, not an error.

Open questions for implementation

• Concurrency / who can share: one sharer at a time, or multiple simultaneous shares (N independent host processes + N offers + a list UI)?
• Subprocess supervision: how peerspeak tracks child lifetime, surfaces viewer_refused / capture failures, and cleans up on room-leave or crash (pixelpass has --repair for orphaned PipeWire state).
• Offer lifecycle on the gossip plane: late joiners — do we re-announce active shares to someone who joins mid-share?
• UI placement: where the Share button + incoming-offer indicators live across the three room layouts (3-Column / Bottom Dock / Drawer).

Build sketch (peerspeak side, for next session)

1. New gossip message variant(s): ScreenShareOffer/ScreenShareEnded in the gossip wire type; bump/relax parsing compatibly.
2. A screenshare subprocess supervisor module (spawn host, parse JSON stdout, track child, kill on stop) — keep the JSON-parsing a pure testable seam.
3. AppMessage + state: StartScreenShare, StopScreenShare, ViewShare(EndpointId), active-share map, "pixelpass present?" probe.
4. UI: Share button + per-peer "View" affordance; graceful disabled state when the binary is absent.