The PipeWire project has made major strides over the past few years, bringing shiny new features, and paving the way for new possibilities in the Linux multimedia scene. With 2021 seeing significant progress made on all fronts, let's take a moment to look back at what was accomplished, and what lies ahead for 2022.

Last year began with busywork on the Bluetooth® front, with amazing volunteers testing and fixing things on PipeWire's Bluetooth® plugin. Throughout the year, the plugin evolved to become perhaps one of the best - if not the best - open source Bluetooth® audio stack implementations that I am aware of. Based on an extensible plugin architecture, Pipewire already supports all current audio profiles and codecs. It is also future proof, enabling it to be integrated with other stacks like ofono. It's a solid base for any Bluetooth® audio use case.

Then, in April, Fedora 34 became the first Linux distribution to ship PipeWire as its default audio service. While PipeWire was there before as a video transport service to enable screen sharing on Wayland, the addition of the audio layer by default exposed all of PipeWire's incredible capabilities to a broader audience. This led to a significant number of improvements that were made to fix issues and improve the experience of several users.

In the meantime, at Collabora, we have been tirelessly working on getting WirePlumber ready to become the default session manager for PipeWire. With the 0.4.0 release that came out in June, WirePlumber introduced all those needed elements to achieve this goal. First and foremost, its Lua scripting engine made it possible to write most of the session management logic in a relatively simple scripting language. With the scripting engine available, it became so much easier for us to then sync all the policy logic with pipewire-media-session in order to replace PulseAudio. It also allowed us to maintain the embedded policy that Automotive Grade Linux uses with much more ease.

In September, we also integrated audio passthrough functionality in PipeWire. This was accompanied by the respective management logic in WirePlumber and pipewire-media-session to keep everything in sync. That has enabled faster audio paths for resource-intensive applications like video games as well as applications on embedded devices, avoiding the need for audio conversions that typically happen in a standard PipeWire audio setup.

Finally, after some intense bug fixing in October, WirePlumber was made the default PipeWire session manager in Fedora 35. It was shortly followed by other major Linux distributions that had started to use PipeWire for audio in the meantime.

Now in 2022, we are looking to the future. We already have designs to improve WirePlumber and experiment with new things. On the short-term horizon, we have plans to rework some parts of WirePlumber in order to make its configuration more user-friendly and the scripts easier to work with. We are also planning to revisit the policy logic and try to go a step beyond what PulseAudio has ever offered. In addition, we are looking forward to experimenting with complex cameras to improve how PipeWire and libcamera work together for an optimal user experience. We aim to lead the way for interesting new camera developments in PipeWire.

Here's hoping this year will be more amazing than the last!