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Is it possible to do two-way screen sharing on Skype mac? if I share my screen with someone, the other person is unable to share theirs with me (thought their camera works). Is this a Premium feature? I've looked on http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/features/allfeatures/screen-sharing/#t_tab_mac but its unclear if this supports two way or not.

thanks

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Screen sharing on Skype is one-way only. Only one person in the call can share their screen with the other callers at one time. With the free accounts the sharing is limited to one-to-one. With the premium accounts you can do a one-to-many broadcast and share your screen out to multiple people at the same time.

This does make some sense, two-way sharing has to overcome a huge problem of mirror-in-mirror replication. The same sort of effect you get when you place two mirrors, facing each other, and look into them. There's an infinitely repeating, but gradually reducing, view of the other mirror, in the other mirror, in the other mirror, in the other mirror...

A similar thing would occur if you were to do a 2-way share.

If you use VNC for screen sharing you can actually force the two-way share to happen and see the effect for yourself.

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  • Just to state something more explicitly: 2-way simultaneous sharing is impossible. And nothing that I'm aware of could possibly pull it off.
    – Jason Salaz
    Sep 8, 2011 at 23:56
  • Actually, it's technically feasible. GoTo Meeting hides their service bar from remote viewers when you share out your desktop -- no one else sees the bar, they see what's under it on your desktop. That means they have a way to selectively mask out portions of applications from the share. Presumably that same approach could allow you to open a window that was viewing the other person's desktop, but was masked out of their view of your desktop. I just don't think it'd be that popular a feature for the effort it'd take to develop.
    – Ian C.
    Sep 9, 2011 at 0:05
  • That's not two-way though, two-inputs on one desktop, but not two-way. Two-way could only work with virtual consoles ala. (Microsoft) Remote Desktop or multiple VNC sessions on a single server. But there's no way one person can control another's live desktop, and vice versa.
    – Jason Salaz
    Sep 9, 2011 at 7:51
  • He never asked for control, only to share screens. Skype screen sharing doesn't offer control. It's a view-only sharing.
    – Ian C.
    Sep 9, 2011 at 12:36
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    Thanks: I have two monitors, usually share the second display and have the callers' skype window on the laptop. So your mirror-in-mirror problem would not be an issue. @VxJasonxV: not wanting to control the other computer, just see what they have on their screen. Two way would be great: I can show them what to do, then watch them practice on their own data. Sounds like Skype can't do what i wanted, even in Premium.
    – Steve
    Sep 10, 2011 at 20:31
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What do you want to share? I am a Windows User, and there I use Visual Studio Live Share, which is great for code / development. Since a few weeks also Visual Studio Code (the "simple" text editor for developers) has that feature as well. It works is BOTH directions and even between Mac, Windows and even Linux ...

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