PipeWire

PipeWire is a server and user space API to deal with multimedia pipelines. This includes:

• Making available sources of video (such as from a capture devices or application provided streams) and multiplexing this with clients.
• Accessing sources of video for consumption.
• Generating graphs for audio and video processing.

Nodes in the graph can be implemented as separate processes, communicating with sockets and exchanging multimedia content using fd passing.

Building

Pipewire uses the Meson and Ninja build system to compile. You can run it with:

$ meson build
$ cd build
$ ninja

You can see the available meson options in meson_options.txt file.

If you're not familiar with these tools, the included autogen.sh script will automatically run the correct meson/ninja commands, and output a Makefile. It follows that there are two methods to build Pipewire, however both rely on Meson and Ninja to actually perform the compilation:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ make

Running

If you want to run PipeWire without installing it on your system, there is a script that you can run. This puts you in an environment in which PipeWire can be run from the build directory, and ALSA, PulseAudio and JACK applications will use the PipeWire emulation libraries automatically in this environment. You can get into this environment with:

$ ./pw-uninstalled.sh