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> Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work, and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create a

> Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work, and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create an account immediately. It think that Discord is generally good at what it does, except that I never could quite get the screen sharing working - there would never be audio from any software/game that I would be running, no matter what I tried. But a lot of it is also probably network effects - solutions like Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are perfectly serviceable for chat (although they compete more with Slack/Teams) but they also never quite got enough love to have anyone develop voice/video chat that actually works well. Or even then, you most likely need pretty decent (and expensive) servers for that.

ajwilson 3y ago
There's a strange 'feature' of Discord where if you share your whole screen, audio is not transmitted. If you share the specific application, audio will be transmitted. I'm not sure why it works like this. It's documented on their website under the 'How do I screen share with Go Live?' section: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-Go-Live-and-Screen-Share https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-G...
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Discord captures audio at the application level by inserting a DLL with a hook on the relevant system calls. This works remarkably well, all things considered, but it does have a couple side effects, notably the fact that if you're not streaming at the application level, audio doesn't work (they could probably work around this if they wanted to, but it's basically a natural consequence), and the fact that some applications will become unstable or crash when being streamed. It also requires every anticheat ever to whitelist Discord's DLL.
worble 3y ago
If you're on Linux, screen audio just doesnt work full stop. There are some modded versions of the discord app that get around it[0], I don't know exactly how they work but it does actually allow you share audio. 0: https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio
- AlbinoDrought 3y ago
  It's interesting that there's a workaround. I always assumed it was an upstream Chromium [0] or Electron [1] issue. 0: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1143761 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=114376... 1: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10515 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10515

ajwilson 3y ago

There's a strange 'feature' of Discord where if you share your whole screen, audio is not transmitted. If you share the specific application, audio will be transmitted. I'm not sure why it works like this. It's documented on their website under the 'How do I screen share with Go Live?' section: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-Go-Live-and-Screen-Share https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-G...

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Discord captures audio at the application level by inserting a DLL with a hook on the relevant system calls. This works remarkably well, all things considered, but it does have a couple side effects, notably the fact that if you're not streaming at the application level, audio doesn't work (they could probably work around this if they wanted to, but it's basically a natural consequence), and the fact that some applications will become unstable or crash when being streamed. It also requires every anticheat ever to whitelist Discord's DLL.

worble 3y ago

If you're on Linux, screen audio just doesnt work full stop. There are some modded versions of the discord app that get around it[0], I don't know exactly how they work but it does actually allow you share audio. 0: https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio

AlbinoDrought 3y ago
It's interesting that there's a workaround. I always assumed it was an upstream Chromium [0] or Electron [1] issue. 0: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1143761 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=114376... 1: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10515 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10515