contrib/pipewire

contrib/pipewire how to

Breaking changes

Since pipewire 0.3.39, the default „example“ session manager was outsourced to be it's own subproject. Right now, you have two choices: the example media-session or wireplumber. This port does not decide for you, instead it builds with none and you are free to choose yours.

Note that you need to choose. Without a session manager, your audio and video setup will stop working!

Intro

pipewire is a modern multimedia server. Quoting gentoo wiki, it's strenghts are:

• Minimal latency capture/playback of audio and video
• Real-time multimedia processing
• Multi-process architecture allowing multimedia content sharing between applications
• Seamless support for PulseAudio, JACK, ALSA, and GStreamer
• applications sandboxing support with Flatpak

Getting pipewire to run is relatively easy on CRUX. This is a simple guide and relies on further reading upon official and unofficial resources.

This might also be considered a WIP entry. You can help by sharing your experiences and thoughts.

Prerequisites

• working kernel with alsa audio
• opt/alsa-utils will be installed by default as a dependency and needs to be configured by the user
• currently, pipewires default config makes use of opt/alsa-ucm-conf, consider installing that alongside the default dependency opt/alsa-utils
• pipewire requires a session-manager to run to operate correctly. You can choose between contrib/media-session and contrib/wireplumber freely.

Optional prerequisites

• pipewire needs pulseaudio to be built with xorg-libxtst around to have the pulseaudio portal available
  • prt-get depinst xorg-libxtst && prt-get update -fr pulseaudio
• contrib/rtkit and a realtime compatible kernel to help with latency, add your user to rtkit group to be able to make use of it
  • an stackoverflow question on the topic
  • Real-Time Linux collaborative project
  • Arch wiki
  • linuxaudio.org wiki
• please look at contrib/pipewire/Pkgfile for further optional dependencies listed and rebuild the package after installing new optional dependencies

Running pipewire

pipewire will always leverage alsa, so you should configure that first. Use alsactl store to store those settings, and configure /etc/rc.conf to start /etc/rc.d/alsa by default. While you are in rc.conf, make sure you start /etc/rc.d/dbus too, if you haven't already.

Resources:

• Official ALSA wiki
• Gentoo wiki
• Arch wiki

Currently, pipewires default config format might always change, so it is advised to keep an eye on rejmerge to keep your configs updated. The default config can be copied from /usr/share/pipewire to /etc/pipewire to be modified. The configuration of /etc/pipewire can be copied over to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pipewire, which should most likely point you to $HOME/config/pipewire. There you will need to enable a session manager and optionally enable pulseaudio support for example.

With your configuration in place you need to run /usr/bin/pipewire from a users shell or script (for example I have this in my i3 config: exec "/usr/bin/pipewire"), just make sure that whatever session you are running will be executed as a dbus-user-session too (for example from my ~/.xinitrc: exec dbus-run-session -- i3).

You can verify your running pipewire session by examining the output of pw-dump.

Running pipewire-pulse as a pulseaudio-server

If you are a pulseaudio-user, make sure it won't autostart with your session. For pipewire to handle pulse-clients, you will need to run /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse as well. Verify that it is working with pactl info which should now report: Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.22). Now you can use tools like contrib/pavucontrol or contrib/ncpamixer to control your typical sources and sink settings, ports like opt/firefox-bin and whatever else uses pulseaudio should work ootb for you too.

Running jack applications through pipewire

to be expanded

Debbuging pipewire

You can run pipewire like that from a terminal: PIPEWIRE_DEBUG=3 pipewire

Further configuration and fine-tuning

To help configuring, consider reading through the following resources alongside the extensive comments in the default config:

• Official pipewire wiki
• Advanced Configuration notes by jasker5183 (pipewire dev)
• Arch wiki
• Gentoo wiki

tl;dr

„I don't have any time to read up on stuff myself, tell me what I need to do right now to get this hot mess!“ -some user

• optional: prt-get depinst xorg-libxtst pulseaudio et al, see Pkgfile
• install prt-get depinst pipewire
• install a session manager, you don't need both!
  • prt-get depinst media-session or prt-get depinst wireplumber
• make changes to your config per usual
• execute while starting your X11/Wayland-Session: /usr/bin/pipewire
• optional: execute in addition to have pulseaudio-server support: /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse

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