Speaker
Description
WirePlumber is the default session and policy manager for PipeWire, responsible for deciding which audio and video streams get connected to which devices or applications, and under what rules. In 2026 its internals got a significant update, and this talk will cover the biggest changes.
First, a new permission manager lets WirePlumber grant or restrict what each client is allowed to see and do on the PipeWire graph, using simple matching rules instead of specific pieces of logic scattered across scripts. This gives WirePlumber a proper, centralized way to sandbox untrusted or restricted clients.
Second, WirePlumber's policy logic runs as scripts, which can occasionally take a while to execute. This could stall the graph objects that WirePlumber runs locally. Now those objects run on their own separate thread, isolated from scripting, so audio and video keep flowing smoothly no matter what the policy layer is doing.
Finally, streams and stream links are now modeled as first-class objects instead of being bundled into a single abstract session item object. This makes it much easier to reason about what's actually flowing through the graph, in addition to allowing nodes to support multiple streams easily.
This talk explains why each change was needed and what it means for anyone building on top of PipeWire.
Speaker Bio
Julian is a Multimedia Software Engineer working at Collabora since 2019, where he works mostly with Audio on the PipeWire and WirePlumber projects.
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