Red Hat / Fedora To Focus On Driving New Linux Video Improvements Around PipeWire

[oiaohm]

I wonder if Pipewire actually complicates the audio playback for simple use cases. Many systems have multiple outputs. Like when you have three monitors with integrated speakers, onboard 7.1 HD audio, iGPU with HDMI audio output, other GPU with HDMI audio output, USB headset, audio via bluetooth. The mixer is full of different controls, but in and out. Now you can also draw routing graphs with DSP effects.

Yes and no.

https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects

People were attempting to add audio effects like noise removal with pulseeffects before pipewire. So not having routing graphs and DSP effects in pulseaudio was leading to some horrible work around as well.

Remember pipewire can store and use all the meta data pulseaudio did so is able to use that metadata to do simple setups. Due to having the means to do metadata all the way out to jackaudio like stuff as well means you can have a simple setup with a little complex mixed in.

There is a little more complexity doing the server the pipewire way for audio. But the server design being a little more complex means not needing horrible hacks because you have run into a limit of functionality of the audio server.

See the yes and no. Yes it is slightly more complex but over all its not more complex because you don't have horrible hackly solutions for like pulseeffects was to add in functionality. Pipewire might be just at the ideal sweet spot for a audio sound server on complexity. The hard problem of being complex enough to perform the tasks required and not too complex to use.

[brad0]

Glad I dont use this crap.

[You-]

Pipewire is enabled on Ubuntu since 21.04

AFAIK it is not default for audio. You will likely need to wait until atleast 22.10 for that (22.04 is an LTS release so they wont want such a big change), but more likely 23.04 (my impression is that for the release after LTS they also take it a little easy, so 23.04 is a better target) or 23.10 (this if they dont get it ready earlier and want it in next LTS).

[doomie]

Pipewire might be just at the ideal sweet spot for a audio sound server on complexity. The hard problem of being complex enough to perform the tasks required and not too complex to use.

From what I can tell, this seems to be the case. I have tried some limited recording and processing on linux, and having looked into the options and history of sound on linux, PipeWire seems to be very worth the trouble.

[arQon]

AFAIK it is not default for audio. You will likely need to wait until atleast 22.10 for that (22.04 is an LTS release so they wont want such a big change), but more likely 23.04 (my impression is that for the release after LTS they also take it a little easy, so 23.04 is a better target) or 23.10 (this if they dont get it ready earlier and want it in next LTS).

meh. If Pipewire actually works, there's no reason not to have it in 22.04. OTOH, if it only "works" as well as Pulse did when we had to suffer through THAT dumpster fire, having it be the default in an LTS would be irresponsible, as you say.

[reba]

Using PipeWire for some time now on my Debian installation. Although it screams "experimental" in the packages description, on the Wiki page and everywhere for my modest consumer-needs it works very very well.

Received a headset the other day and at first it did not work out of the box. Although connecting, it was immediately dropped with a message like "unsupported protocol". After some minutes of digging I found this, installed the package "libspa-0.2-bluetooth" and viola - works like a charm!
The audio quality is even noticeably better when the headset is connected to the linux laptop as when it is when connected to the Windows 10 office laptop: lesser digital glitches, better stream synchronization after bad connections, e.g. when I am far away and the connection gets unstable.

So far two thumbs up from me.

[Awesomeness]

Too bad Canonical is shitty again and prefers to wait 5-10 years until they adopt it for Ubuntu and only after that, maybe give a hand to improve it.

But once they do assign a part-time employee to help out with development a bit, they won't shut up on their blog about it and act as if they alone were advancing it.

[tomas]

Glad I dont use this crap.

What specifically is it that you think is "crap" in that picture?

[perpetually high]

Haven't read the thread yet but:

As part of bolstering the Linux multimedia stack, Red Hat is going to be working on a fresh round of video feature work to PipeWire led by its founder Wim Taymans. In particular, the area they will be focusing on is improving the video capture support on Linux.

No one can tell me Wim Taymans isn't a fake name 🤣🤣

That's obviously Tim Waymans. Laughing my ass off here. If his name is really Wim Taymans, I apologize. That's a freaking awesome name.

edit: https://twitter.com/wtaymans. I stand corrected. Real name, no gimmicks. Awesome guy, better name, and even better project.

[blacknova]

Glad I dont use this crap.

Don't be scared it is not that complicated.

What I don't get is how RedHat is planning to integrated remote desktop and desktop sharing into this.