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I needed cross-platform screen capture in Rust, so I built pinray

6.3 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth
8
novelty
6
actionability
7
community
4
strategic
3
personal
6

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Building a Rust screen capture crate is technically deep but niche.

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I needed cross-platform screen capture in Rust, so I built pinray
Summary

Pinray is a new Rust crate providing a unified API for cross-platform screen and system audio capture, directly wrapping native OS APIs (DXGI, ScreenCaptureKit, PipeWire, XDG Desktop Portal) without depending on ffmpeg or large frameworks. It delivers raw video and audio frames with rich metadata—timestamps, pixel format, stride, sequence numbers, and dropped-frame notifications—addressing gaps in existing crates like xcap (missing stride/pixel format) and scap (unmaintained, PipeWire 0.8.0 dependency issues). The crate supports Linux (Wayland/X11), macOS 12.3+, and Windows 10+, with a builder pattern for capture sessions and backend auto-detection.

Author

Rupam Golui

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