In 2015, Taymans started work on PipeWire. It was based on ideas from several existing projects, including one called PulseVideo by William Manley.[8][9][10][11] According to Red Hat's Christian Schaller, it drew many of its ideas from an early PulseVideo prototype by Manley and builds upon some of the code that was merged into GStreamer due to that effort.[5] A goal of the project was to improve handling of video on Linux in the same way that PulseAudio improved handling of audio.[2]
Although a separate project from PulseAudio, Taymans initially considered using the name "PulseVideo" for the new project.[2] By June 2015, the name "Pinos" was being used, after the city Pinos de Alhaurin in Spain, where Taymans used to live.[5]
Initially, Pinos only handled video streams. By early 2017, Taymans had started working on integrating audio streams. Taymans wanted to support both consumer and professional audio use cases, and consulted Paul Davis (Jack developer) and Robin Gareus (Ardour developer) for advice on implementation for professional audio. At this time, the name PipeWire was adopted for the project.[8]
In April 2021, Fedora Linux 34 became the first Linux distribution to ship PipeWire for audio by default.[14][15][16] A year later, Pop! OS adopted it as the default audio server in version 22.04.[17] It was made the default audio server in Ubuntu beginning with version 22.10.[18] In 2023, it was adopted as the default audio server for the GNOME desktop environment in Debian 12 Bookworm.[19]
