PipeWire

PipeWire is low-level multimedia framework that provides:

• Graph based processing.
• Support for out-of-process processing graphs with minimal overhead.
• Flexible and extensible media format negotiation and buffer allocation.
• Hard real-time capable plugins.
• Very low-latency for both audio and video processing.

See Overview for an overview of PipeWire and Design for the design principles guiding PipeWire.

Documentation

• Configuration
• Programs
• Modules
• Pulseaudio Modules

See our Wiki for more information on how to configure and use PipeWire.

Components

PipeWire ships with the following components:

• A PipeWire Daemon that implements the IPC and graph processing.
• An example PipeWire Session Manager that manages objects in the PipeWire Daemon.
• A set of Programs to introspect and use the PipeWire Daemon.
• A PipeWire Library to develop PipeWire applications and plugins (tutorial).
• The SPA (Simple Plugin API) used by both the PipeWire Daemon and in the PipeWire Library.

API Documentation

See PipeWire API.

Resources

• PipeWire and AGL
• LAC 2020 Paper
• PipeWire Under The Hood
• PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus (LWN)
• PipeWire Wikipedia
• Bluetooth, PipeWire and Whatsapp calls
• Intoduction to PipeWire
• A custom PipeWire node