PipeWire 0.3.44 Released With Latency Improvements, Minimal PW Server Support

This will hopefully be the year that PipeWire becomes commonplace on the Linux desktop across all major distributions for audio/video stream management. But for as good as PipeWire is already, frequent point releases continue evolving the functionality and ironing out compatibility improvements for existing JACK and PulseAudio integration. PipeWire 0.3.44 is out today as another step in the right direction.

PipeWire 0.3.44 is another notable point release for this audio/video stream server developed by Red Hat in cooperation with other organizations. PipeWire keeps getting better and with v0.3.44 there are improvements such as:

- Support for running a minimal PipeWire server without a session manager like WirePlumber. The minimal PipeWire server is enough that it can run JACK clients.

- The maximum buffer size is now configurable and can surpass the previously hard-coded limit of 8192 samples.

- The default maximum latency was lowered from 170 to 42 ms.

- Continued work on enhancing JACK compatibility.

- Bluetooth crash fixes.

- An X11-bell module is introduced for handling X11 bell events.

- PW-V4L2 now works for FFmpeg's ffplay.

- The pipewire-pulse.conf configuration file now supports per-application quirks/properties.

More details on the PipeWire 0.3.44 release via FreeDesktop.org GitLab.