Bringing together audio and video, PipeWire for Linux is really coming along

So it can be used to share my screen/sound over the Internet?
Why it's better than Pulseaudio?

have any of you tried to get pulse apps (Spotify etc.) to work with jack on pipewire I was reading this
pipewire-late-summer-update-2020 (Creating audio sink devices with Jack) PIPEWIRE_PROPS="media.class=Audio/Sink" calfjackhost
I either read it wrong or missed something.


Last edited by joni909 on 7 September 2020 at 11:45 am UTC

So it's like pulseaudio + gstreamer? I remember redirecting audio and video streams with gst-something back and forth my cellphone with Linux (N900) and my PC many years ago.

I've only redirected audio over the network with pulseaudio on my Sailfish phones, but the multimedia framework is based on gstreamer so I guess this might still work. Takes a bit of tinkering though.

Still wish the Sailfish phones came to the US, and my N9 / N900 hadn't been killed off by Nokia. N900 is still my favorite phone I've ever owned.

Still wish the Sailfish phones came to the US, and my N9 / N900 hadn't been killed off by Nokia. N900 is still my favorite phone I've ever owned.

For my current phone I went for the cheapest piece of hardware supported by Sailfish X I could find for sale locally (the Sony Xperia 10), and then bought the OS separately. The phone isn't great but it does the job, and Sailfish is the only mobile OS I can tolerate. Jolla doesn't produce hardware anymore, so Sailfish X is the way to go.

Anyway, this doesn't help you much seeing as the OS is only available in "EU, Norway, Switzerland" according to Jolla's site.

So how is progess? Great by the sound of it.

Stealth pun!

All the work going into it sounds quite impressive ...

Ouch! It's a one-two PUNch!


Seriously though, mebs this will get my system to sort out my MOBO's Realtek audio ports. Mic is shared with either line-in or side-speaker and using either results in a horrible, noisy connection. (I use a cheap external USB sound-card as a workaround.) Playing with pipe-wire is probs above my skill set at the moment, but I'll be interested to see where it goes.

PipeWire is like PulseAudio with video.

In the olden days you could only play one audio stream at the time on Linux, because most sound cards only have a single hardware channel. Then ALSA added software mixing with dmix to allow for multiple audio streams. Then there was EsounD and aRts sound servers. Then eventually came PulseAudio.

Whereas nothing much really happened for video. You still can only access your webcam via a single application at the same time.

PipeWire allows things like sharing video sources like webcams, so you can have a video stream going to a conference call while saving it to a file and broadcasting to YouTube at the same time. Maybe apply some fancy effect somewhere in between, because why not?

It also greatly simplifies screen capture, because your window manager can take care of the capture part, because it knows where and what is being rendered, and you just get the video stream as input. No more messing around with X libs, finding the right window, cropping it, etc.

I honestly think that PipeWire is one of the most innovative projects for the Linux desktop at the moment, and definitely deserves attention.

In the olden days you could only play one audio stream at the time on Linux, because most sound cards only have a single hardware channel.

Not sure what "olden days" you're referring to, but it seems to me that the situation for default audio chipsets now is much worse than it was in soundcard days. The old wavetable cards had a whole stack of channels back in the 90s.

I'm hoping pipewire does things right. Pulse has some nice ideas, but a lot of practical issues. The main one is not having enough control over what it does. These sort of systems need a full gui to control it though. I have a setup where one computer connects to my main desktop to play audio. I've set that up maybe two times and as a result I don't remember the details and need to consult the documentation every time.

Not sure what "olden days" you're referring to, but it seems to me that the situation for default audio chipsets now is much worse than it was in soundcard days.

Somewhere after dedicated soundcards started losing popularity, and before proper software mixing.

My audio journey on Linux went something like this:

• No sound at all.
• Single stream, reload the driver when playing different bitrates, otherwise crackling sound.
• No more crackling sound.
• Software mixing in ESD, crackling sound is back.
• Proper software mixing with dmix, as long as your asound.conf is configured properly.
• Software mixing by default, no more asound.conf.
• PulseAudio brings per-application volume settings, crashes a lot.
• Most applications do not support PulseAudio. Need to configure ALSA over Pulse or Pulse over ALSA, or maybe both.
• Time goes by.
• PulseAudio works, no configuration needed.

I do realize that PulseAudio is not perfect. But holy crap have we come a long way.


Last edited by Linas on 8 September 2020 at 1:11 pm UTC

Very very excited about Pipewire. In this aspect, we've been behind Mac and Windows for years now. Can't wait for it to roll out.

I have a feeling that as more outfits use Blender, increased development on audio/video systems for Linux itself may come as a byproduct.

Still wish the Sailfish phones came to the US, and my N9 / N900 hadn't been killed off by Nokia. N900 is still my favorite phone I've ever owned.

For my current phone I went for the cheapest piece of hardware supported by Sailfish X I could find for sale locally (the Sony Xperia 10), and then bought the OS separately. The phone isn't great but it does the job, and Sailfish is the only mobile OS I can tolerate. Jolla doesn't produce hardware anymore, so Sailfish X is the way to go.

Anyway, this doesn't help you much seeing as the OS is only available in "EU, Norway, Switzerland" according to Jolla's site.

Yeah, otherwise I would be using it. Been tempted to install UBPorts on my Sony phone, but it sounds like it doesn't support the Z2 very well. Also waiting for my Librem phone..

". PipeWire should also work directly with anything made for ALSA, PulseAudio and JACK - so you shouldn't see breakage with it."

yeah, i already saw this movie before.

Looks like it works. Now i need something like pavucontrol for it.

It sounds like what I've been doing with JACK but better (I've just been using it as a mixing board). I haven't looked much at pipewire because for some reason when I see "and video" I assume it's going to somehow be wayland related (which I personally am not ready for)... but it sounds like it's more "and video CAPTURE" rather than video output. Now I kinda want to try this.