PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Post by nitrogen » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #47

onli wrote: post #19

> including the raw Linux ALSA sound API, which typically allows only one application to access the sound card. If the raw in that sentence is not meant as a special qualifier and this is meant as a statement about ALSA in general, this is wrong. I recently read up on this to confirm my memory was right when reading a similar statement. In fact, ALSA had just a very short period where typically only one application a…

Another point against dmix: I would be surprised if it worked with sandboxes like Flatpak. That may be another reason why major desktop-oriented distros like Fedora Workstation haven't embraced it.

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #51

FooBarWidget wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, ALSA had just a very short period where typically only one application accessed the sound card. For some definition of 'short period'. Software mixing via dmix worked for me, but at the time I've heard for years that dmix was broken for many other people. Not sure whether things are better nowadays. The breakage seems to be caused by hardware bugs. Various authors had the stance that they refuse, on princi…

> For some definition of 'short period'. According to https://alsa.opensrc.org/Dmix , enabled by default since 1.0.9rc2. https://www.alsa-project.org/wiki/Main_Page_News shows that was 2005. Alsa 1.0.1 release was 2004. So it's only short when counting from then on, project start was 1998. But https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6735 for example called it new 2004, so I don't think it was much of a default choice be…

Post by pkulak » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

ledbettj wrote: post #9

nitsky wrote: post #3

PipeWire has worked very well for me both as a drop-in replacement for PulseAudio and to enable screen sharing on Wayland.

It also worked as drop in replacement for PulseAudio for me, except all my audio now had stutters and pops. I ended up going back to Pulse. I got suggestions that I could go tweak buffer sizes stuff in a config file somewhere, but for my simple desktop use case I'd rather my audio just sounds right out of the box. Hopefully this sort of thing gets straightened out, because having to muck with config files to make my…

Post by asabil » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #19

> including the raw Linux ALSA sound API, which typically allows only one application to access the sound card. If the raw in that sentence is not meant as a special qualifier and this is meant as a statement about ALSA in general, this is wrong. I recently read up on this to confirm my memory was right when reading a similar statement. In fact, ALSA had just a very short period where typically only one application a…

Post by cycloptic » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

tylerjl wrote: post #48

> Second, D-Bus was replaced as the IPC protocol. Instead, a native fully asynchronous protocol that was inspired by Wayland — without the XML serialization part — was implemented over Unix-domain sockets. Taymans wanted a protocol that is simple and hard-realtime safe. I'm surprised to read this; I was under the impression that D-Bus was the de jure path forward for interprocess communication like this. That's not t…