Pipewire Struggle

[nroth]

Pipewire lets me use the new snapshot camera app. Yay! That's about where the fun ends.

For those considering a switch to pipewire, it looks like it gets a camera working, but neither of my smart speakers work even on the latest master of pipewire and they both worked fine with pulseaudio: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/...ssues/3340 , https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/...ssues/3210

And unfortunately the call audio does seem very messed up on the latest master :/


The audio routing on this is a mess and it seems like pipewire doesn't like it. For example, it does not switch correctly to the earpiece when placing a call and there tends to be distortion that I did not have in pulse.

If I can't get that to work reliably I'll have to switch back and give up the convenient camera...

My solution for now is to place a call to 804-222-1111 each boot to initialize the call audio pipeline, toggle speakerphone a few times until the audio comes out of the earpiece (speakerphone is always horribly distorted). The first call will not switch to the earpiece and the audio will be bad. In the second call, the echo test will be horribly distorted. To make sure people can hear me, I need to call a third time to confirm that the audio comes out of the earpiece and I am audible from the echo test.

With pulseaudio, the call pipeline just worked most of the time, though barely. This seems to break it. And with pipewire and bluetooth headphones or an airplay device (even though those don't work, even if they're present in the graph), it will just never work.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with the UCM audio routing on the PPP or with pipewire and have no idea where to file it, but it's a huge usability problem!

Suggestions welcome. I am running Manjaro ARM with Phosh and the latest updates.

---

From the chat:
[I] <Arnavion> pmos phosh uses pa. Don't know about plamo or sxmo
[I] <Arnavion> I've been using pmos phosh with pw for many months and everything works fine except the audio volume slider thing in the bar that you pull down from the top
[I] <Arnavion> I assume it's because that UI element gets initialized before pipewire-pulse starts up and binds the socket, unlike on a systemd distro where the socket would be bound by systemd from the start

[nroth]

UPDATE: I found a solution that lets me use pipewire for the camera and pulseaudio for sound, and documented it in a blog post: https://nicholasroth.net/2023/07/09/the-...phone-pro/

[Jite]

UPDATE: I found a solution that lets me use pipewire for the camera and pulseaudio for sound, and documented it in a blog post: https://nicholasroth.net/2023/07/09/the-...phone-pro/

Hello and thanks for your tutorial. 

I have successfully improved telephone calls on my arch ppp setup. However, I have run into problems streaming video from the browser. Although this may be a different problem, the one area I had trouble following from your tutorial was to disabling the Alsa and bluez monitor. When I try to echo “alsa_monitor.enabled = false” and “bluez_midi_monitor.enabled = false”, I get the no such file or directory. Did you create the “70-disable-alsa.lua” file first?

As I say this may not be related to my problem but I wanted to try to follow your tutorial exactly to see if it made a difference. 

Thanks for your help with the audio as it has made the ppp usable as a daily driver for me now that phone calls are mostly sorted now.

---

UPDATE: I found a solution that lets me use pipewire for the camera and pulseaudio for sound, and documented it in a blog post: https://nicholasroth.net/2023/07/09/the-...phone-pro/

Hello and thanks for your tutorial. 

I have successfully improved telephone calls on my arch ppp setup. However, I have run into problems streaming video from the browser. Although this may be a different problem, the one area I had trouble following from your tutorial was to disabling the Alsa and bluez monitor. When I try to echo “alsa_monitor.enabled = false” and “bluez_midi_monitor.enabled = false”, I get the no such file or directory. Did you create the “70-disable-alsa.lua” file first?

As I say this may not be related to my problem but I wanted to try to follow your tutorial exactly to see if it made a difference. 

Thanks for your help with the audio as it has made the ppp usable as a daily driver for me now that phone calls are mostly sorted now.

As a follow-up to this I realised there was a / missing in the command when copying the main.lua.d directory and when I added this all the commands worked without a problem. Even better, it has now enabled me to watch videos from the web browser and have pipe wire enabled for snapshot camera support without having to remove wireplumber for pipewire media session like I was having to do before. 

So in summary this has sorted out the issue that I previously described.

[nroth]

> As a follow-up to this I realised there was a / missing in the command when copying the main.lua.d directory 

Fixed! Thanks for letting me know.