After many months of hard work from our team, I am pleased to announce Beta 6 Release Candidate 1 which again contains a huge amount of changes along with some very exciting new features.

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Major New Features

Audio Support

Up until this release getting audio from the Virtual Machine has always been problematic. Looking Glass now supports the audio transport via the SPICE protocol. Currently we support output via PulseAudio and PipeWire so this should just work out of the box for most people. See the documentation for how to configure your Virtual Machine to make use of this feature.

For those that are not using SPICE for input or clipboard sync note that you can use just the audio component alone if you desire.

Thanks to a new team member @spencercw the new audio support has also been enhanced with audio skew compensation which corrects for audio clock drift between the virtual machine and your physical audio hardware and makes it possible to achieve extremely low latency audio.

Please note that there are still the usual limitations due to QEMUs implementation of the virtual audio hardware (Intel ICH), such as 48,000Hz 16-bit support only. Also the SPICE audio protocol does not support greater then two channels (stereo) output.

With these changes we no longer recommend or support the usage of alternative solutions such as QEMU direct audio output, or the SCREAM network audio device.

Virtual Display Support

Previously it was required to remove the virtual video device from the virtual machine leaving you blind if you have a VM issue, this is no longer the case. This update brings with it not only compatibility with the virtual device being present, but also the ability to use it.

If you have a virtual video device present and the Looking Glass host service has not started/crashed or you have disabled the video feed, the client application will fall-back to the SPICE display feed and show an indicator in the corner to show it has done this.

Please note that if the LG host application is not running or responding you will need to capture the mouse/keyboard (ScrollLock) to control VM via SPICE.

Change Log

B6-rc1

• Installer now supports installing IVSHMEM drivers
• Installer is now built with high DPI support
• Audio via SPICE support added for PipeWire
• Cursor scaling support added
• Audio output & input via SPICE via PulseAudio and PipeWire added
• Documentation has a new look based off of readthedocs
• Refactored PureSpice and added logging
• Enhance the KVMFR protocol to pass guest information to connected clients
• If spice is in use, check that it's connected to the correct guest using it's UUID
• Add LGMP memory corruption detection and recovery for more reliable startups
• Added new message boxes when things go wrong
• Playback and volume keys now supported in capture mode
• Fixed incorrect drawing of masked color mouse pointers on EGL
• Added the ability to specify a startup EGL filter preset (egl:preset=Name)
• Audio stretching support was added thanks to @spencercw
• Added forwarding of (Windows) guest window flashing to activation requests in hosts
• Add microphone privacy features: prompt to allow/deny recording and input indicator glyph.
• ScrollLock+Up/Down to simulate volume control keys and ScrollLock+M to simulate mute key in guest
• Add new host side down-sample feature to DXGI D3D11 & NvFBC to reduce memory bandwidth & CPU load for DSR/VSR users.
• Updated AMD FSR to v1.0.2
• The input:escapeKey option can now accept string values such as KEY_F1, and will print a list of valid values if an invalid value is provided.
• [X11] Positioning the window and setting full screen via config or command line now works as expected
• Docs layout update with straightforward Usage section
• Implemented spice display support
• Added spice display fallback status indicator
• Unified the splash screen for the renderers into an overlay
• Added new win:overlayDimsDesktop option for easier A/B filter testing/comparisons.
• Allow microphone recording to be stopped/restarted at will
• [EGL] Fix incorrect window letter boxing causing garbage on the bottom edge of the screen in some scenarios
• spice cursor channel is implemented, allowing hardware cursors to be displayed with spice video
• fixed a wayland protocol error when toggling capture mode at the same time as closing the options overlay
• fix a clipboard-related wayland crash in presence of misbehaving third party apps
• allow default microphone state to configured at runtime
• improve error message when no display server is loaded