I’m suddenly unable to get audio for video files, but only for one user and seemingly only with pipewire… It’s the same in all video players I’ve tried, flatpak and deb.
If I log in as a different user everything is fine. And if I change the audio to alsa in mpv I get audio again there. Music files are unaffected.
I don’t know if a permissions issue has arisen somewhere, another application is ‘hogging’ pipewire, or something else.
Any help much appreciated!
Debian 13, GNOME 48, Wayland
Is the pipewire service enabled for that user? It’s a systemd user service
Is the video player application itself muted in pipewire? What’s the output device set to?
You can check these things with an application like
pavucontrol. Pipewire (and pulse) have a default audio device, but individual applications can set a different audio device if they want to.Another great category of utilities for pipewire is virtual patchbays. If you’re looking for something simple, helvum or qpwgraph are geat. For all the technical details in a GUI, coppwr provides a good experience.
Check the groups the working user is included in, and make sure the non-working user is in those same groups. See if anything there.
Edit: Oh, you know what. I think this is probably Pipewire not starting for multiple users when multiple are logged in. On the non-working user, you need to start a unique Pipewire session for that user, because the other working user’s session can’t be shared by default.
If you’re not super up on your systemd commands, use systemctl --user (no sudo):
systemctl --user status pipewireSession rings a bell for me this https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/674496/how-to-reset-pipewire-settings#674499 worked
Boom, looks like it’s sorted, thanks! I didn’t have a ~/.local/state/pipewire/media-session.d/ directory, but I deleted ~/.local/state/wireplumber/ and then rebooted and all was well again 🤸
Any idea what might have caused the problem in the first place?
MPV is no longer responding to my keyboard shortcuts for media controls (play/pause etc). Not a biggie but understanding the issue might help me solve that too.
I had issues with media keys and ended up using a plugin to handle it: https://github.com/hoyon/mpv-mpris
This may not be the proper solution (since yours were working previously, mine never worked) but if you don’t have any other suggestions it may work for you.
No luck so far. When I use ‘groups username’ in the terminal to compare the groups of both users they are exactly the same. Interestingly neither show ‘audio’ or ‘video’ as a group that they’re in - both users are only in ‘username’ and ‘users’. Yet both are able to play video, and only one gets audio along with it… The behaviour is the same from a cold boot with only one user logged in as it is when there are two users logged in.
Yeah, see my edit. This is a Pipewire session thing. Each user needs a unique Pipewire session to do audio. Video has nothing to do with Pipewire.
I’m not familiar with pipewire, but is there a mixer somewhere in the pipe?
