Agora Releases Flutter SDK v5.0.0

March 4, 2022 By Meherdeep Thakur In Developer

It won’t come as a surprise that the Flutter SDK is getting more stronger and stable to support all the platforms be it native mobile or desktop. With the latest updates to the Flutter SDK we have seen great advancements in the desktop support and to align ourselves with the Flutter community, Agora is releasing v5.0.0 with desktop support and some other cool features. Here are the key highlights.

Compatibility Changes

Supports Flutter 2

Besides better performance and architectural changes, Flutter 2 brings in features like null safety; meaning that variables can’t contain null unless defined as optional.

New Features

Desktop Support

Agora Flutter SDK now supports two more platforms: macOS and Windows. So you can use your single code base to build live video calling or live video streaming applications for mobile and desktop.

With the addition of new platforms, comes some really exciting features, and with this release screen sharing has been added directly to the Flutter SDK for Windows and macOS.

Also, teachers and streamers have been asking for dual-stream and it’s now supported by Flutter 5.0.0 where you can share your screen and push your camera stream at the same time to the video channel. Here are a few methods to add screen sharing to your application:

getScreenShareHelper : Gets a child process object.
startScreenCaptureByDisplayId : Shares the screen by specifying the display ID.
startScreenCaptureByWindowId : Shares the whole or part of a window by specifying the window ID.
srartScreenCaptureByScreenRect : Shares the whole or part of a screen by specifying the screen rect.

Video Rendering

With the introduction of two more platforms, there has been changes in terms of the core technology to render the video.

Android has two rendering types SurfaceView and TextureView both of them are supported by the SDK.
In iOS the SurfaceView is SDK rendering and TextureView is raw data self-rendering.
Windows and macOS both have only one rendering type, that is raw data self-rendering

Improvements

Framework

The development architecture of the platform has been refactored and developed based on the IRIS framework. This architectural change helps in building a much more stable and advanced SDK that aligns with our native SDK.

These are just some of the updates that are in the agora_rtc_enginge 5.0.0 release. Make sure to check out the full release notes for all the updates Flutter Release Notes.

You can find the full package details at pub.dev.