Bouzas: PipeWire, the media service transforming the Linux multimedia landscape

PipeWire was originally created to only handle access to video resources and co-exist with PulseAudio. Earlier versions have already been shipping in Fedora for a while, allowing Flatpak applications to access video cameras and to implement screen sharing on Wayland. Eventually, PipeWire has ended up handling any kind of media, to the point of planning to completely replace PulseAudio in the future. The new 0.3 version is marked as a preview for audio support.

But why replace PulseAudio? Although PulseAudio already provides a working intermediate layer to access audio devices, PipeWire has to offer more features that PulseAudio was not designed to deliver, starting with a better security model, which allows isolation between applications and secure access from within containers.

Another interesting feature of PipeWire is that it unifies the two audio systems used on the desktop, JACK for low-latency professional audio and PulseAudio for normal desktop use-cases. PipeWire was designed to be able to accommodate both use cases, delivering very low latency, while at the same time not wasting CPU resources. This design also makes PipeWire a much more efficient solution than PulseAudio in general, making it a perfect fit for embedded use cases too.