In Ubuntu 22.10 PipeWire will be used instead of PulseAudio

pipewire

a few days ago the news was released that version development repository Ubuntu 22.10 moved to use the PipeWire media server default for audio processing.

With this change, packages related to PulseAudio have been removed from the desktop and desktop-minimal packages, and for compatibility, instead of libraries to interface with PulseAudio, a pipewire-pulse layer has been added that runs on top of PipeWire, allowing you to keep all existing PulseAudio clients running.

The person who confirmed the change was Heather Ellsworth of Canonical, who through a post commented on the change. decision to fully migrate to PipeWire on Ubuntu 22.10.

Note that in Ubuntu 22.04 both servers were used in the distribution: PipeWire was used to process video when recording screencasts and providing screen access, but audio continued to be processed using PulseAudio. On Ubuntu 22.10, only PipeWire will remain.

That's right, as of today the Kinetic iso (pending, not current yet as changes have just been made) has been updated to run only pipewire and not pulseaudio. So @copong, you can expect this for kinetic.

For Jammy, you may notice that you have both pipewire and pulseaudio running. This is because pulseaudio is still used for audio, but pipewire is used for video. (Pipewire is required for streaming and screen sharing on Wayland.)

I hope this clarifies our plans regarding pipewire/pulseaudio, but let us know if you have any more questions.

Two years ago, a similar change was already implemented in the Fedora 34 distribution, which allowed us to provide professional audio processing capabilities, eliminate fragmentation and unify the audio infrastructure for different applications.

For those unaware of Pipe Wire, you should know that this offers an advanced security model that allows you to manage access by device and by stream, making it easy to stream audio and video to and from isolated containers.

Pipe Wire can process any media stream and can mix and redirect not only audio streams, but also video streams, as well as manage video sources (video capture devices, webcams, or screen content displayed by applications). PipeWire can also act as a low latency audio server and provide functionality that combines the capabilities of PulseAudio and JACK , including addressing the needs of professional audio processing systems that PulseAudio could not claim.

Of the characteristics key that can be highlighted:

  • Ability to capture and play audio and video with minimal delay
  • Tools for real-time video and sound processing
  • Multi-threaded architecture that allows organizing shared access to content across multiple applications
  • Graph-based processing model of media nodes with support for feedback loops and atomic graph updates. It is allowed to connect controllers both inside the server and in external plugins
  • Efficient interface for accessing video streams via file descriptors and audio access via a shared ring buffer
  • Ability to process multimedia data from any process
  • The presence of a plugin for GStreamer to simplify integration with existing applications
  • Support for sandboxes and Flatpak package system
  • Support for plugins in SPA (Simple Plugin API) format and the ability to create plugins that work in hard real time
  • Flexible system for negotiating used media formats and buffer allocation
  • Ability to use a single background process to route audio and video.
  • The ability to act as a sound server, a hub for providing video to applications (for example, for the gnome-shell screencast API), and a server for controlling access to video capture hardware devices.

Finally, for those who are interested in knowing more about the note, they can consult the thread of the discussion at the link below.


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