Monthly Archives: September 2017

Launching Pipewire!

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In quite a few blog posts I been referencing Pipewire our new Linux infrastructure piece to handle multimedia under Linux better. Well we are finally ready to formally launch pipewire as a project and have created a Pipewire website and logo.Pipewire logo

To give you all some background, Pipewire is the latest creation of GStreamer co-creator Wim Taymans. The original reason it was created was that we realized that as desktop applications would be moving towards primarly being shipped as containerized Flatpaks we would need something for video similar to what PulseAudio was doing for Audio. As part of his job here at Red Hat Wim had already been contributing to PulseAudio for a while, including implementing a new security model for PulseAudio to ensure we could securely have containerized applications output sound through PulseAudio. So he set out to write Pipewire, although initially the name he used was PulseVideo. As he was working on figuring out the core design of PipeWire he came to the conclusion that designing Pipewire to just be able to do video would be a mistake as a major challenge he was familiar with working on GStreamer was how to ensure perfect audio and video syncronisation. If both audio and video could be routed through the same media daemon then ensuring audio and video worked well together would be a lot simpler and frameworks such as GStreamer would need to do a lot less heavy lifting to make it work. So just before we starting sharing the code publicaly we renamed the project to Pinos, named after Pinos de Alhaurín, a small town close to where Wim is living in southern Spain. In retrospect Pinos was probably not the worlds best name :)

Anyway as work progressed Wim decided to also take a look at Jack, as supporting the pro-audio usecase was an area PulseAudio had never tried to do, yet we felt that if we could ensure Pipewire supported the pro-audio usecase in addition to consumer level audio and video it would improve our multimedia infrastructure significantly and ensure pro-audio became a first class citizen on the Linux desktop. Of course as the scope grew the development time got longer too.

Another major usecase for Pipewire for us was that we knew that with the migration to Wayland we would need a new mechanism to handle screen capture as the way it was done under X was very insecure. So Jonas Ådahl started working on creating an API we could support in the compositor and use Pipewire to output. This is meant to cover both single frame capture like screenshot, to local desktop recording and remoting protocols. It is important to note here that what we have done is not just implement support for a specific protocol like RDP or VNC, but we ensured there is an advaned infrastructure in place to support any protocol on top of. For instance we will be working with the Spice team here at Red Hat to ensure SPICE can take advantage of Pipewire and the new API for instance. We will also ensure Chrome and Firefox supports this so that you can share your Wayland desktop through systems such as Blue Jeans.

Where we are now
So after multiple years of development we are now landing Pipewire in Fedora Workstation 27. This initial version is video only as that is the most urgent thing we need supported for Flatpaks and Wayland. So audio is completely unaffected by this for now and rolling that out will require quite a bit of work as we do not want to risk breaking audio on your system as a result of this change. We know that for many the original rollout of PulseAudio was painful and we do not want a repeat of that history.

So I strongly recommend grabbing the Fedora Workstation 27 beta to test pipewire and check out the new website at Pipewire.org and the initial documentation at the Pipewire wiki. Especially interesting is probably the pages that will eventually outline our plans for handling PulseAudio and JACK usecases.

If you are interested in Pipewire please join us on IRC in on freenode. Also if things goes as planned Wim will be on Linux Unplugged tonight talking to Chris Fisher and the Unplugged crew about Pipewire, so tune in!

Red Hat Graphics team looking for another engineer

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So our graphics team is looking for a new Senior Software Engineer to help with our AMD GPU support, including GPU compute. This is a great opportunity to join a versatile and top notch development team who plays a crucial role in making sure Linux has up-to-date and working graphics support and who are deeply involved with most major new developments in Linux graphics.

Also as a piece of advice when you read the job advertisement remember that it is very rare anyone can tick all the boxes in the requirement list, so don’t hesitate to apply just because you don’t fit the description and requirements perfectly. For example even if you are more junior in terms of years you could still be a great candidate if you for instance participated in GPU related Google Summer of Code projects or just as a community contributor. And for this position we are open to candidates from around the globe interested in working as remotees, although as always if you are willing or interested in joining one of our development offices in either Boston-USA, Brisbane-Australia or Brno-Czech Republic that is a plus of course.

So please check out the job advertisement forSenior Software Engineer and see if it could be your chance to join the worlds premier open source company.