Please Pardon Our Dust

A few years ago, a mistake cost the site its content, and I was dumb enough to lose my backups.

Since then, I had planned to make a new site with fresh content. However, two transitions were taking place in the Linux world that were making me hesitant to get back on the horse.

PipeWire

The first transition taking place was the one away from PulseAudio and Jack to the PipeWire system. PipeWire is a background system that handles audio and video as streams, providing the low latency and redirection capabilities of Jack, while keeping the simplicity of PulseAudio. Additionally, unlike the previous tools, PipeWire is not limited to audio, as it also allows the redirection of video streams. This makes PipeWire a powerful tool for media production in general.

The hesitation, however, was up until fairly recently, it was still untested; it had a lot of potential, but it would have required a lot of very involved installation to become useful, especially since most distributions did not include the software by default. Installing it would have required a careful removal of packages for PulseAudio that might have been interfered with by dependencies.

As of this post, however, the major distributions have PipeWire in their packaging systems, and a few have it installed as a default. These include Fedora, Ubuntu (At least, from 22.10 on), OpenSuse (Tumbleweed) and Arch (Garuda, Manjaro), all of which have made it available by default.

Wayland

Another major transition (which is still ongoing) is the inclusion of Wayland as a GUI platform. While it’s not quite “default” level yet, there are advantages to using Wayland when working with media.

First, it supports direct rendering and better frame timing, which cuts down on the screen tearing that plagues X11, which can be important when performing screen recording for video production. It has lower latency than X11, since it is not a network protocol, which allows for smoother display, and less chance of your system slowing down when you need it running quickly. It has support for HDR and color profiling, which provides more exact control over the colors you choose. And it is designed to work well with modern graphical APIs like Vulkan, which can provide an improved (and smoother) interface.

Of course, to get the full benefit of Wayland, you will want to have PipeWire set up. This allows you to manipulate your screen and cameras in the same way that you can pipe your audio.

Plans

Once upon a time, I took it upon myself to write one article a week, with the hope that not only would I learn the techniques in doing so, but I would also provide a way to document the tools used in Linux.

I fell off the horse, and now, I’m getting back on.