After almost a year of development, a new stable branch of the multimedia server PipeWire 1.6.0 has been released. PipeWire, which replaces the PulseAudio sound server, is distinguished by its tools for working with video streams, low-latency audio processing, and a new security model for device- and stream-level access control. This project is widely utilized on Fedora Linux, RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE/openSUSE, and various other Linux distributions. Written in C, the code is distributed under the MIT license.
Based on a multi-process architecture, PipeWire allows content sharing across multiple applications. It offers the ability to process any multimedia stream, mix and redirect video streams, and control video sources such as video capture devices, web cameras, or screen content displayed by applications. PipeWire facilitates collaboration between multiple webcam applications and resolves issues related to secure screen capture and remote screen sharing in a Wayland environment.
As an audio server, PipeWire can achieve minimal latency and provides functionalities that combine the capabilities of PulseAudio and JACK, meeting the requirements of professional audio processing systems that PulseAudio previously could not satisfy. The advanced security model of PipeWire enables access control at the device and stream level, simplifying the forwarding of audio and video from and to isolated containers.
In the latest version of PipeWire, several new features have been introduced:
- Added support for the LDAC audio codec, utilized for high-quality audio transmission over Bluetooth, with decoding facilitated by the libldac library.
- The “bluez5-plc-spandsp” option has been incorporated to address packet loss during audio transmission over Bluetooth, leveraging the capabilities of the SpanDSP library.
- Implemented a secure implementation of functions for parsing and creating serialized objects in POD (Plain Old Data) format