PipeWire Is Doing An Excellent Job Handling Audio/Video Streams On The Linux Desktop
PipeWire is now widely found across Linux desktops for managing audio/video streams and successfully replacing the roles of PulseAudio and JACK. Wim Taymans provided an update over work done to PipeWire over the past year as well as some of what is on the table for the upcoming PipeWire 1.4 feature release.
Last summer saw the release of PipeWire 1.2 with explicit sync and other features. Some of the other recent PipeWire development tasks has included multi-threaded execution in the server, improved start/stop of nodes, Flatpak security context handling, more Bluetooth codec support like for Opus and AAC-ELD, and lazy scheduling.
Red Hat engineers have also been working on PipeWire as part of the web camera support within the Firefox web browser. That web camera with Firefox integration is already being shipped with Fedora Linux.
PipeWire 1.4 is nearly complete. Some of the features being worked on include MIDI 2.0 support, FFmpeg with Vulkan Video converter support is another area being tackled within PipeWire. Vulkan-powered video converters and Vulkan processing filters are among the video enhancements that are on their current radar. On the Bluetooth side some upcoming work includes ASHA hearing aid support and BAP broadcast sinks. Various smaller improvements and bug fixing will be worked on by PipeWire developers in the near-term.
Those wanting to learn more about the PipeWire happenings for 2025 can find Wim's presentation assets for his FOSDEM talk via FOSDEM.org.
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