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 API Documentation

Resources

LAC 2020 Paper PipeWire Under The Hood