Wayland's Weston Lands A Pipewire Plug-In As New Remote Desktop Streaming Option

Wayland's Weston compositor for the past year has provided a remoting plug-in for virtual output streaming that was built atop RTP/GStreamer. Now though a new plug-in has landed in the Weston code-base making use of Red Hat's promising PipeWire project.

The PipeWire plug-in was merged into Weston today and is similar to the GStreamer-powered remoting plug-in but instead leverages PipeWire. The compositor's frames are exported to PipeWire and the same virtual output API is shared between these plug-ins. The virtual outputs can be configured using the weston.ini configuration file. Any PipeWire client in turn can read these frames.

More details from the commit introducing this new plug-in.

PipeWire is the Red Hat led open-source project aiming to be the central source for managing audio and video streams on Linux. Ultimately PipeWire wants to serve as a replacement for the likes of PulseAudio and JACK while having similar aspirations for video. PipeWire is also designed around the needs of Wayland, Flatpak, and other modern desktop technologies. Both KDE and GNOME have already implemented PipeWire-based remote desktop capabilities for Wayland while today's work is about the Weston reference compositor.