I’ve been involved a little bit with the process of porting RPiPlay to run on desktop Linux. RPiPlay is a program originally designed for the Raspberry Pi that acts as an AirPlay Mirroring server and supports mirroring your iOS device’s screen to your Raspberry Pi’s video out. Originally it only supported the Raspberry Pi, but antimof reworked the code to also work on desktop Linux with GStreamer, and I helped get it across the finish line and merged back into the main project.
A while ago, I noticed that when I ran RPiPlay in a VMware virtual machine during development, the video was messed up. It looked like some kind of horizontal synchronization issue. The image looked like it was stretching out further and further to the right on each successive line.
It worked fine on my laptop running Linux directly, which is probably the way most people use RPiPlay, so I didn’t think much more about it at the time. It bothered me though. It seemed to be a problem at a level deeper than RPiPlay, and I really wanted to understand why it was happening. So of course, I recently dug myself deep into a rabbit hole to try to figure it out.
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