Hi Geoffrey On Tue, Dec 2, 2025 at 4:31 PM Geoffrey McRae <[email protected]> wrote:
> > The PipeWire and PulseAudio backends are used by a large number of users > in the VFIO community. Removing these would be an enormous determent to > QEMU. > They come with GStreamer pulse/pipe elements. > > Audio output from QEMU has always been problematic, but with the > PulseAudio and later, the PipeWire interface, it became much more user > friendly for those that wanted to configure the VM to output native > audio into their sound plumbing. > Could you be more specific? > I do not agree that ALSA is as useful as you state it is, it's dependent > on the host system's audio hardware support. If the sound device doesn't > support hardware mixing (almost none do anymore), or the bitrate/sample > rate QEMU wishes to use, your out of luck. > > What I do think needs fixing here is the removal of the forced S16 audio > format, and the resampler which forces all output to 48KHz. This though > would require changes to the SPICE protocol as currently it is fixed at > two channel 48KHz S16 also IIRC. > > Why is it a problem that Spice requires 48khz? Afaik, you can't have both Spice & another backend (unlike VNC which does monitor to capture) > IMHO adding GStreamer is unnecessary, we have the modern PipeWire > interface which is compatible with everything. I see absolutely no > reason to add so much complexity to the project for little to no gain. > > Pipewire alone is not compatible with Windows or OSX, afaik.
