# PipeWire Overview

PipeWire is a new low-level multimedia framework designed from scratch that
aims to provide

* 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
* achieve very low-latency for both audio and video processing

The framework is used to build a modular daemon that can be configured to:

* be a low-latency audio server with features like pulseaudio and/or jack
* a video capture server that can manage hardware video capture devices and
  provide access to them
* a central hub where video can be made available for other applications
  such as the gnome-shell screencast API.

## Components

Currently PipeWire ships with the following components:

* a PipeWire daemon that implements the IPC and graph processing
* an example session manager that manages objects in the PipeWire
  daemon.
* a set of tools to introspect and use the PipeWire daemon.
* a library to develop PipeWire applications and plugins.

### The PipeWire daemon

### The example session manager

### Tools

### Application development