Re: bluetooth audio under pipewire: playback silent?

Dear Tim,

* wim.taymans <[email protected]> [2026-07-03 16:06]:
[...]
> Pairing happens completely inside bluez. The final part where the codecs and settings are negotiated is offloaded to PipeWire and then PipeWire receives an fd from bluez where it can send/receive packets from the device.
Thanks, good to know! What's an "fd"?
 
> The pairing and connection is done in bluez so that part probably still works as before.
[...]
Yes, this works.
 
> It would suggest the PipeWire bluetooth plugins are not installed or working on your machine.
That's very valuable info! I have the libspa-0.2-bluetooth package
installed on Debian, which is described as "This package contains a
plugin to make Bluetooth audio devices such as speakers and headsets
available to the PipeWire server".

Its file list
https://packages.debian.org/trixie/amd64/libspa-0.2-bluetooth/filelist
includes
/usr/share/spa-0.2/bluez5/bluez-hardware.conf
which is a long list of bluetooth audio devices, which doesn't feature
mine. Is there a fallback for unknown devices?

It seems strange that the device is visible in
	wpctl status
and that I can set it as default using
	wpctl set-default 63
and can inspect its settings via
	wpctl inspect 63
which look good and unconspicuous, but I am still not getting audible
output.

> > Note that I don't have the pulseaudio-module-bluetooth package
> > installed, as it conflicts with pipewire-alsa, which I want to keep.
> 
> pulseaudio-module-bluetooth is no longer needed.
-sighing with relief-

Thanks again! Any other ideas are very welcome!
Peter