PipeWire: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 15:06, 23 July 2022
 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
When elogind is not available, the user has to be added to the audio group. The user must re-log-in in for this to take effect.
# addgroup <user> audio
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 # rc-service dbus start # rc-update add dbus default
Then use dbus-run-session whenever you start an X or Wayland session. For example:
$ dbus-run-session -- sway
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
If you are not using a Desktop Manager, ensure that your XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is set to a user-writable location. By default for pulseaudio this is /run/user/1000/ or /tmp. If this is not set, pipewire will create a directory in your home folder instead, called ~/pulse, and on attempting to run Pavucontrol or pactl, you will get the following error:
$ pactl list Connection failure: Connection refused pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused
Installation and configuration
# apk add pipewire wireplumber
Realtime scheduling
For realtime scheduling, it is recommended to use rtkit,
# apk add rtkit
and then add your user to the `rtkit` group.
Alternatively, ensure your user has the right ulimit permissions. You generally need (limits.conf format):
@audio - memlock 256 @audio - nice -11 @audio - rtprio 88
This allows a member of the audio group to have the right permissions for PipeWire to use realtime scheduling without rtkit.
ALSA
# apk add pipewire-alsa
ALSA support works out of the box if you have the pipewire-alsa package. You may need the snd_seq kernel module.
PulseAudio
PipeWire can run a PulseAudio daemon which should allow all existing PulseAudio applications to be used with the PipeWire backend. You need to have pipewire-pulse installed.
JACK
If you will be using PipeWire for JACK applications install the required package (pipewire-jack). Things should work with just that.
Video
Video should work out-of-the-box with v4l2 devices (e.g. a lot of webcams) and GStreamer applications.
Bluetooth audio
- Enable PulseAudio support as described above
- Install bluetooth service packages:
bluez bluez-openrc pipewire-spa-bluez - Optional: install GUI manager for bluetooth
blueman - Enable and start bluetooth service:
rc-update add bluetooth; rc-service bluetooth start - Restart PipeWire
- Use commandline program
bluetoothctlor GUI programblueman-managerto scan and pair bluetooth audio devices. - Use pavucontrol to adjust volume and manually select high definition bluetooth codecs.
Automatic bluetooth profile selection
To automatically switch between HSP/HFP and A2DP profiles when an input stream is detected, set the bluez5.autoswitch-profile property to true:
/etc/pipewire/media-session.d/bluez-monitor.conf
...
rules = [
{
...
actions = {
update-props = {
...
bluez5.autoswitch-profile = true
...
TODO: for pipewire the config is somewhere else
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 - KDE Plasma with
xdg-desktop-portal-kdeand Firefox - Sway with
xdg-desktop-portal-wlrand Firefox, see Sway for details
Usage
Start the PipeWire media server. You'll probably get quite a few errors but just ignore them for now.
$ /usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher
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!
wireplumber:
$ wpctl status
Test sound is working using an audio file in a format supported by libsndfile (e.g. flac, opus, ogg, wav).
# apk add pipewire-tools $ pw-cat -p test.flac
If you have a microphone test audio recording 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 /usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher command to ~/.xinitrc or your window manager's config file.
Troubleshooting
`wpctl status` shows no targets
First, check whether ALSA knows about your sound card:
aplay -l
If sound devices are found, the issue is with your pipewire configuration. Consider double-checking the instructions above.
Otherwise, your sound card may not be supported in the version of the Linux Kernel you're running. You should search online for fixes relating to your current kernel version and the codec of your sound card. You can find each of these with:
uname -r cat /proc/asound/card0/codec* | grep Codec
Quick Configuration
You might want to use pavucontrol to have a simple GUI app for controlling sound, outputs, etc, in which case:
# apk add pavucontrol