SDL2 Lands Native PipeWire Support

While SDL2-enabled games/applications can already work on PipeWire-based systems like the forthcoming Fedora Workstation 34 thanks to the PulseAudio compatibility layer, the SDL2 library has merged initial support for interfacing with PipeWire.

Merged on Sunday were various pieces of PipeWire audio support code for the SDL library including the playback/capture sink abilities. SDL2 now has a build time option for enabling PipeWire support as well as for whether to dynamically load it.

PipeWire is the Linux audio/video stream server developed by Red Hat and others to better suit today's Linux desktop needs and handle the use-cases currently served by both PulseAudio and JACK. Fedora Workstation 34 this spring is aiming to use PipeWire by default and other Linux distributions will likely follow in due course.

Those curious about SDL2's new PipeWire support can see these commits providing the initial enablement.