Arch Linux

Wild Penguin

Member

Registered: 2015-03-19

Posts: 347

Play audio without logging in [pipewire]

Hi,

If I ssh into my computer, I can not play any audio via pipewire. The audio devices are just not available.

Now, if I physically log into said computer, suddenly I can play audio locally. Or, can log into the computer via SSH and play audio, while also logged in locally at the same time. I can even ssh into the computer, start a tmux, and run mpv to play some internet radio.

Now, if I change the VT on the computer, locally, to one where this user had not logged in, audio playback stops (mpv remains running). If I change back the VT, audio playback resumes.

All this makes a whole lot of sense - the one who is sitting in front of the computer should be the one who is controlling what is coming out of any audio capabilities of the computer.

Now, how can I override this behavior? Disable all pipewire/wireplumber on this user, add the user to audio group and play via ALSA directly?

What part is responsible for this whole nice - but in this niche use case - undesireable wireplumber/pipewire setup? On most situations I would like to keep this (nice) behavior, but sometimes disable it, as I have a box I sometimes run headlessly connected to some A/V equipment. I tried 'systemctl --user disable wireplumber`, pulseaudio, pluseaudio.socket and stopping all of them, but some part of the login process still restarts them. What makes 'the innards' tick, and hot to disable and enable it easily?

Cheers!