PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

The fact that PipeWire has the potential to replace both PulseAudio (for consumer audio) and Jack (for pro audio) with a unified solution is very exciting.

Re: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

#5

Post by pta2002 » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:27 PM UTC

Just tried it on NixOS, had no idea it was so fleshed out already! Thought it'd be full of bugs but was pleasantly surprised, it just worked. No issues with compatibility, extremely low latency and has JACK and PulseAudio shims, so everything works out of the box, including pro audio stuff like Reaper and Ardour. And thanks to the JACK shim I can patch around the outputs with qjackctl. This is compared to JACK, which I never managed to properly combine with PulseAudio.

Re: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

#6

Post by xorcist » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

What does real world latency look like with Pipewire?

Is it comparable to jackd when used with something like Ardour?

Re: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

#7

Post by londons_explore » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

Without audio buffer rewinding, you're going to have to suffer random stutters and jumpiness every time your system comes under heavy load. Your system does an NMI because you plugged the power cable in? Your audio will glitch. It will also mean you won't be able to sit with an idle CPU while playing music - the audio daemon will have to wake up to reload buffers multiple times per second, killing battery life unacceptably for playing audiobooks on a phone...

Saying rewindable audio is a non-feature might simplify the codebase, but if it makes it work badly for most use cases, it ought to be rethought.

Re: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

#8

Post by nialv7 » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

pipewire already works surprisingly well. Even bluetooth source and sink works.

Only problems I had so far are:

* sometimes bluetooth devices would connect but not output audio, have to restart pipewire.

* sometimes pipewire gets confusing and doesn't assign audio outputs properly. (shows up in pavucontrol as "Unknown output")

Re: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

#9

Post by ledbettj » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

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 sound server actually work is like going back to working directly with ALSA or OSS.

Re: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

#10

Post by chenxiaolong » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:33 PM UTC

I've been trying out the latest master builds of pipewire recently and have been pretty impressed with it:

* My bluetooth headset can now use the HFP profile with the mSBC codec (16 kHz sample rate) instead of the terrible CVSD codec (8 kHz sample rate) with the basic HSP profile.

* Higher quality A2DP stereo codecs, like LDAC, also work.

* AVDTP 1.3 delay reporting works (!!) to delay the video for perfect A/V sync.

* DMA-BUF based screen recording works with OBS + obs-xdg-portal + pipewire (for 60fps game capture).

For my use cases, the only things still missing are automatic switching between A2DP and HFP bluetooth profiles and support for AVRCP absolute volume (so that the OS changes the headset's hardware volume instead of having a separate software volume).