PipeWire has released version 1.4.6 as a maintenance update to its audio/video handling server for Linux systems. This update introduces various improvements, particularly focusing on the usability and stability of the audio server.
Among the notable changes, version 1.4.6 adds the ability to disable RAOP (Remote Audio Output Protocol) through a new context property, along with enhancements to ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) plugins. There has also been significant work on improving latency reporting in the combine stream and fixing issues that could cause crashes in the filter-chain and ALSA plugin.
The update addresses a refcount issue in the device provider, improves handling of ALSA errors by enabling interrupts to maintain data flow, and provides better reset capabilities for some statistics after errors. The filter-graph’s save activation and deactivation have been optimized to avoid potential crashes.
Originally released on March 6, 2025, PipeWire 1.4 boasted substantial features such as support for the RISC-V architecture, a PipeWire JACK control API, DSD playback capabilities for ALSA, Bluetooth enhancements, and more. Other features included UCM split PCMs, WebRTC2 support, a new Telephony D-BUS API, and improved handling for multimedia streams.
PipeWire has become integral to many popular Linux distributions and is the default choice for managing multimedia streams. It is utilized for camera handling within the Mozilla Firefox browser as well. Users can download the latest PipeWire 1.4.6 release from the official GitLab page.