> So is pipewire a replacement/superset of gstreamer?
It is neither. Gstreamer deals with codecs and such. It's a set of libraries that an application uses to handle multimedia needs.
Pipewire is a service that handles streams and passes them off to hardware.
If you wrote e.g. a music player, you could tell gstreamer to play a .mp3 file, and it would decode it (by using its mp3 codec) and send the audio off to the pipewire socket, and pipewire would send it to the hardware to actually, you know, play. Pipewire would handle buffering and resampling and mixing and all that fun stuff.
Pipewire sits at the same level in the stack where pulseaudio sat before, and gstreamer also talked to that (and in fact you can speak to pipewire as if it was pulseaudio).
It's simply that it was written by a person also involved with gstreamer.
It is neither. Gstreamer deals with codecs and such. It's a set of libraries that an application uses to handle multimedia needs.
Pipewire is a service that handles streams and passes them off to hardware.
If you wrote e.g. a music player, you could tell gstreamer to play a .mp3 file, and it would decode it (by using its mp3 codec) and send the audio off to the pipewire socket, and pipewire would send it to the hardware to actually, you know, play. Pipewire would handle buffering and resampling and mixing and all that fun stuff.
Pipewire sits at the same level in the stack where pulseaudio sat before, and gstreamer also talked to that (and in fact you can speak to pipewire as if it was pulseaudio).
It's simply that it was written by a person also involved with gstreamer.