A couple months ago I was searching for a screen sharing application to collaborate with friends. I’m a software engineer by trade and I naturally am working on a couple of side projects at any given time. Finding a decent screen sharing app turned out to be much more of a headache than I could’ve imagined. Every app my friends and I used consistently had a caveat that rendered it unusable.

The Discovery Phase

I’m not sure how many people have tried using any sort of screen sharing app these days, but it’s a bit of a mess. You’ll have to either download an application, install a plugin, register countless accounts, send friend invites, or even pay hefty premiums. All the while the quality is still subpar.

Hangouts? Not optimized for screen sharing. Text is blurry and contains artifacts with no way to control the quality.

Slack? Screen sharing is a premium feature at $7/user in the Slack server.

Skype? Ha…

Eventually I discovered that Discord has a screen sharing feature. After giving it a try, we discovered that the quality was not good enough to share detailed text. However, Discord’s premium Nitro (now Nitro classic) service was $5/mo for one person to gain the ability to stream high quality video to any number of people. We decided to give it a try and… it worked very well! Occasionally the quality would degrade, depending on CPU/network quality, but for the most part it handled streaming 1080p video with legible text fairly easily.

The Depression Phase

Shortly following the hunt, I purchased a Macbook. The upcoming iOS apps I would be developing and the Docker for Windows fuckery I experienced (story for another time) made it an easy choice, if not an essential one. Surprisingly enough, I had gone through life until this point without owning an Apple device or even a laptop.

Almost immediately, I discovered that Discord’s screen sharing capabilities crumbled to the ground on my shiny new Mac. My 3rd generation Core i5 processor on my desktop handled 1080p streaming fine, but the same attempt on my core i7 6-core Mac (with discrete GPU) brought the thing to its knees.

I’m not exaggerating. Starting up the camera or a 720p/1080p screen share session rendered MacOS unusable. Every animation was jittery, typing was behind massive input lag, and that was just sharing my screen and editing a text document. A look at the activity monitor indicated that Discord was utilizing anywhere from 100–300% CPU. Yikers…