PipeWire

PipeWire is low-level multimedia framework that provides:

• Graph based processing
• Support for out-of-process processing graphs with minimal overhead
• Flexible and extensible media format negotiation and buffer allocation
• Hard real-time capable plugins
• Very low-latency for both audio and video processing

See Overview for an overview of PipeWire and Design for the design principles guiding PipeWire.

Components

PipeWire ships with the following components:

• a PipeWire Daemon that implements the IPC and graph processing
• an example PipeWire Session Manager that manages objects in the PipeWire Daemon
• a set of PipeWire Tools to introspect and use the PipeWire Daemon
• a PipeWire Library to develop PipeWire applications and plugins (tutorial).
• the SPA (Simple Plugin API) used by both the PipeWire Daemon and in the PipeWire Library.

API Documentation

See PipeWire API

More Documentation

See our Wiki for More information on how to configure and use PipeWire.

Resources

• LAC 2020 Paper
• PipeWire Under The Hood
• PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus (LWN)
• PipeWire Wikipedia