I’ve recently switched to Pipewire after getting an headphone DAC. PulseAudio is quite terrible and delivering low latency audio at high sample rates. So Pipewire fixed my issues, however, now I’m facing another problem:
I’m unable to play any videos/audio in Firefox.
When playing videos on YouTube, Firefox freezes for half a minute, then the video attempts to play, but stays on frame 1.
Anyone know what can be done to avoid this?
do you have pipewire-pulse installed? it’ll provide a shim for the applications that really want to find pulseaudio.
It is installed, however apparently it doesn’t work:
$ pactl info
Connection failure: Timeout
What does systemctl --user status pipewire-pulse say?
$ systemctl --user status pipewire-pulse
● pipewire-pulse.service - PipeWire PulseAudio
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire-pulse.service; enabled; pr>
Active: active (running) since Sun 2023-01-15 19:20:43 EET; 2s ago
TriggeredBy: ● pipewire-pulse.socket
Main PID: 13918 (pipewire-pulse)
Tasks: 2 (limit: 13038)
Memory: 1.6M
CPU: 12ms
CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/pipew>
└─13918 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
Jan 15 19:20:43 systemd[846]: Started PipeWire PulseAudio.
Jan 15 19:20:43 pipewire-pulse[13918]: mod.rt: Can't find xdg-portal: (null)
Jan 15 19:20:43 pipewire-pulse[13918]: mod.rt: found session bus but no portal
lines 1-14/14 (END)
Installed xdg-desktop-portal package, assuming it might help, but upon restarting the service, nothing much changed.
It is difficult to tell with the information given whether this is actually a pipewire problem, a Firefox problem or a video driver issue. What version of Firefox? Nightly, dev, stable? Is the system fully updated? Does this issue happen using Chromium? What happens if you turn hardware acceleration off in Firefox? Is the FF profile corrupt? Is an extension causing the issue? Is it just a coincidence that this recently started happening since switching to pipewire?
I have no issue running you tube videos on FF stable with pipewire on EndeavourOS in a VM. But the VM may be using the sound server from the host (Manjaro) which is running pulse.
What about
systemctl --user status pipewire pipewire-session-manager
?
Seems that the issue sorted itself out by itself after giving the system a restart.
Not sure what happened, and was unable to reproduce it afterwards.
I was using the stable version of Firefox off Arch’s repos. Certainly nothing to do with the video drivers, Firefox was probably hanging the video playback due to it not being able to engage the audio system.
I haven’t tried it with Chromium. Hardware acceleration is disabled as it causes some issues at my end.
It only started to happen after I installed PipeWire, I don’t think it was a coincidence.
Maybe it happened because I started VLC before Firefox, to test the audio out by playing a few tracks. Maybe that screwed up some things 
pipewire and pipewire-session-manager were both active, the former was active, but the latter was not.
Thanks for the help guys.
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