How to fix broken video (youtube / rumble etc) after pipewire update

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

After rebooting into a new kernel today I noticed all video (youtube / rumble etc) hung on every browser & every kernel (seems to be due to a pipewire update)

I tried the various workarounds on the Arch forums:

downgrading back to 1.2.7 / 1.4.0 (neither version fixed the issue)

  • pipewire
  • libpipewire
  • gst-plugin-pipewire
  • pipewire-audio

replacing pulseaudio with pipewire-pulse (not possible in my case due to using gdm)

I workaround this issue (until pipewire is fixed or gdm no longer depends on pulseaudio) with:

  • systemctl --user stop pipewire

  • pipewire will immediately get socket activated by the app trying to play sound

& bound it to a keyboard shortcut in XFCE

I also enabled the --user service for pipewire (as it’s default is enabled)

2

gdm no longer depends on pulseaudio so the other day I was able to install pipewire-pulse(which removed pulseaudio) - to properly fix this issue