PipeWire: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 11:53, 23 February 2021
 The instructions below have not been thoroughly tested and may break things. |
PipeWire is a multimedia processing engine that aims to improve audio and video handling on Linux.
Prerequisites
Audio Group
Add your normal user to the audio group. The user must log in for this to take effect.
# addgroup audio <user>
D-Bus
PipeWire requires a running D-Bus session. If you use a full desktop environment this will probably be started automatically, but with minimal window managers it must be done manually.
# apk add dbus dbus-openrc dbus-x11 # rc-service dbus start # rc-update add dbus default
Then use dbus-launch whenever you start an X or Wayland session. For example:
$ dbus-launch --exit-with-session sway
Installation and configuration
# apk add pipewire
Enable the snd_seq kernel module for ALSA support.
# modprobe snd_seq # echo snd_seq >> /etc/modules
Pulseaudio
PipeWire can run a Pulseaudio daemon which should allow all existing Pulseaudio applications to be used with the PipeWire backend.
# apk add pipewire-pulse
To enable the Pulseaudio daemon edit /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and uncomment the following line:
"/usr/bin/pipewire" = { args = "-c pipewire-pulse.conf" }
Jack
If you will be using PipeWire for Jack applications install the required package and make system wide links to the PipeWire replacement Jack libraries (I have not had success using pw-jack). You will not need to start a Jack server.
# apk add pipewire-jack # ln -sf /usr/lib/pipewire-0.3/jack/libjackserver.so.0 /usr/lib/libjackserver.so.0 # ln -sf /usr/lib/pipewire-0.3/jack/libjacknet.so.0 /usr/lib/libjacknet.so.0 # ln -sf /usr/lib/pipewire-0.3/jack/libjack.so.0 /usr/lib/libjack.so.0
Video
Video should work out-of-the-box with v4l2 devices (e.g. a lot of webcams) and GStreamer applications.
Screen sharing on Wayland
You will need the right xdg-desktop-portal backend for your desktop environment. Screen sharing is known to work on GNOME with xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and on KDE Plasma with xdg-desktop-portal-kde and Firefox.
Usage
Start the PipeWire media server. You'll probably get quite a few errors but just ignore them for now.
$ pipewire
In a different terminal window check the default output device. I don't yet know how this default can be changed for all applications, so you'd better hope it's right!
$ pw-cat -p --list-targets
Test sound is working using an audio file in a format supported by libsndfile (e.g. flac, opus, ogg, wav).
$ pw-cat -p test.flac
If you have a microphone test recording audio is working.
$ pw-cat -r --list-targets $ pw-cat -r recording.flac (Speak for a while then stop it with Ctrl+c) $ pw-cat -p recording.flac
Test Pulseaudio clients using a media player (most use Pulseaudio) and if you use Jack test that too:
# apk add jack-example-clients $ jack_simple_client
You should hear a sustained beep.
If you are happy everything is working, make pipewire start automatically when your X or Wayland session starts. For example, you could add the pipewire command to ~/.xinitrc or your window manager's config file.