PipeWire is a server for handling audio, video streams, and hardware on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

. It was created by

Wim Taymans Wim Odilia Georges Taymans is a Belgian software developer based in Malaga, Spain. Taymans started his career in multimedia development on the Commodore 64 writing various games and demos. He was known in the Commodore 64 coding community under ...

at Red Hat. It handles

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...

routing and

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

processing.

History

In 2015, Taymans started work on PipeWire. It was based on ideas from a couple of projects, including one called PulseVideo by William Manley. According to Red Hat's Christian Schaller, it drew many of its ideas from an early PulseVideo prototype by Manley and builds upon some of the code that was merged into

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes the ...

due to that effort. A goal was to improve handling of video on Linux the same way

PulseAudio PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, macOS, as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operat ...

improved handling of audio. Although a separate project from PulseAudio, Taymans initially considered using the name "PulseVideo" for the new project. By June 2015, the name Pinos was being used after a city where Taymans used to live, Pinos de Alhaurin in Spain. Initially, Pinos only handled video streams. By early 2017, Taymans had started working on integrating audio streams. He wanted the project to support both consumer and professional audio use cases. For advice on professional audio implementation he consulted Paul Davis and Robin Gareus. At this time the name PipeWire was adopted for the project. In November 2018, PipeWire was re-licensed from the LGPL to the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

. In April 2021,

Fedora Linux Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. Fedora is the upstream source ...

34 became the first

distribution to ship PipeWire for audio by default. A year later,

Pop! OS Pop!_OS is a free and open-source Linux distribution, based upon Ubuntu, and featuring a customized GNOME desktop environment known as COSMIC. The distribution is developed by American Linux computer manufacturer System76. Pop!_OS is prim ...

adopted it as the default audio server in version 22.04. It was made the default audio server in

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

beginning with version 22.10.

Features

The project aims include: * To work with sandboxed

Flatpak Flatpak, formerly known as xdg-app, is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. It is advertised as offering a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system. ...

applications. * To provide secure methods for screenshotting and

screencasting A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture or a screen recording, often containing audio narration. The term ''screencast'' compares with the related term '' screenshot''; whereas screensh ...

on Wayland compositors. * To unify handling of cases managed by

JACK Jack may refer to: Places * Jack, Alabama, US, an unincorporated community * Jack, Missouri, US, an unincorporated community * Jack County, Texas, a county in Texas, USA People and fictional characters * Jack (given name), a male given name, ...

and

Reception

PipeWire has received much praise, especially among the GNOME and

Arch Linux Arch Linux () is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling-release model. The default installation is a minimal base system, ...

communities. Particularly as it fixes problems that some PulseAudio users had experienced, including high CPU usage, Bluetooth connection issues, and JACK backend issues.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://pipewire.org/
Presentation of Pinos by Wim Taymans

The PipeWire multimedia framework and its potential in AGL
(PDF)
PulseVideo

PipeWire: A Low-Level multimedia subsystem (PDF)
Audio software for Linux Video software for Linux