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

Posted Mar 6, 2020 13:50 UTC (Fri) by sandsmark (guest, #62172)
In reply to: Bouzas: PipeWire, the media service transforming the Linux multimedia landscape by gerdesj
Parent article: Bouzas: PipeWire, the media service transforming the Linux multimedia landscape

The dependency on gstreamer is a bit more annoying than the name, though still fairly minor. I'm not really a big fan of gstreamer (their architectural choices and whatnot) and it's a pretty huge project to drag in just to be able to play sound (assuming you don't use e. g. flatpak but just plain old distro packages).

But just skimming the pipewire code quickly it seems like it's fairly sane wrt. interdependencies in the code. And while I'm not sure if it's a module that's loaded at runtime at the moment it seems to be fairly easy to write a simpler replacement module (or one using libvlc or whatever people want).

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

Posted Mar 6, 2020 15:18 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

As far as I can see from the architecture diagrams, Gstreamer isn't an actual dependency of pipewire. Rather, gstreamer has been kitted out with pipewire plugins that allow apps that already use gstreamer, to carry on undisturbed when the layer underneath gstreamer (namely, pulseaudio) changes to pipewire. Apps that don't use gstreamer at the moment will not need to use it in the future.
The document I am looking at is https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/events/gstreamer-c...