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Boutique open source consulting firm, specialising in GStreamer, PipeWire, PulseAudio and other low-level systems software.

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Asymptotic on hiatus
Sep 24, 2025 · original
Asymptotic was started 6 years ago, when I wanted to build something that would be larger than just myself. We've worked with some incredible clients in this time, on a wide range of projects. I would be remiss to not thank all the teams that put their trust in us. In addition to working on interesting challenges, our goal was to make sure we were making a positive impact on the open source projects that we are part of. I think we truly punched above our weight class (pardon the boxing metaphor), on this front -- all the upstream work we have done stands testament to that. Of course, the biggest single contributor to what we were able to achieve is our team. My partner, Deepa, was instrumental in shaping how the company was formed and run. Sanchayan (who took a leap of faith in joining us first), and Taruntej were stellar colleagues and friends on this journey. It's been an incredibly re
PipeWire ♥ Sovereign Tech Agency
Feb 5, 2025 · original
In my previous post, I alluded to an exciting development for PipeWire . I'm now thrilled to officially announce that Asymptotic will be undertaking several important tasks for the project, thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund (now part of the Sovereign Tech Agency). Some of you might be familiar with the Sovereign Tech Fund from their funding for GNOME , GStreamer and systemd – they have been investing in foundational open source technology, supporting the digital commons in key areas, a mission closely aligned with our own . We will be tackling three key areas of work. ASHA hearing aid support I wrote a bit about our efforts on this front. We have already completed the PipeWire support for single ASHA hearing aids, and are actively working on support for stereo pairs. Improvements to GStreamer elements We have been working through the GStreamer+PipeWire todo list , fixing bug
A Brimful of ASHA
Jan 7, 2025 · original
It's 2025(!), and I thought I'd kick off the year with a post about some work that we've been doing behind the scenes for a while. Grab a cup of $beverage_of_choice , and let's jump in with some context. History: Hearing aids and Bluetooth Various estimates put the number of people with some form of hearing loss at 5% of the population. Hearing aids and cochlear implants are commonly used to help deal with this (I'll use "hearing aid" or "HA" in this post, but the same ideas apply to both). Historically, these have been standalone devices, with some primitive ways to receive audio remotely (hearing loops and telecoils). As you might expect, the last couple of decades have seen advances that allow consumer devices (such as phones, tablets, laptops, and TVs) to directly connect to hearing aids over Bluetooth. This can provide significant quality of life improvements -- playing audio from a
GStreamer + PipeWire: A Todo List
Dec 17, 2024 · original
I wrote about our time at the GStreamer Conference in October, and one important thing I was able to do is spend some time with all-around great guy George reflecting on where the GStreamer plugins for PipeWire are, and what we need to do to get them to a rock-solid state. This is a summary of our conversation, in the form of a to-do list of sorts... Status Quo Currently, we have two elements: pipewiresrc and pipewiresink . The two plugins work with both audio and video, and instantiate a PipeWire capture and playback stream, respectively. The stream, as with any PipeWire client, appears as a node in the PipeWire. Buffers are managed in the GStreamer pipeline using bufferpools , and recently Wim re-enabled exposing the stream clock as a GStreamer clock . There have been a number of issues that have cropped up over time, and we've been plugging away at addressing them, but it was worth st
GStreamer Conference 2024
Nov 6, 2024 · original
All of us at Asymptotic are back home from the exciting week at GStreamer Conference 2024 in Montréal, Canada last month. It was great to hang out with the community and see all the great work going on in the GStreamer ecosystem. Montréal sunsets are 😍 There were some visa-related adventures leading up to the conference, but thanks to the organising team (shoutout to Mark Filion and Tim-Philipp Müller), everything was sorted out in time and Sanchayan and Taruntej were able to make it. This conference was also special because this year marks the 25th anniversary of the GStreamer project! Happy birthday to us! 🎉 Talks We had 4 talks at the conference this year. GStreamer & QUIC ( video ) Sanchayan spoke about his work with the various QUIC elements in GStreamer. We already have the quinnquicsrc and quinquicsink upstream, with a couple of plugins to allow (de)multiplexing of raw streams a
GStreamer and WebRTC HTTP Signalling
Sep 4, 2024 · original
The WebRTC nerds among us will remember the first thing we learn about WebRTC, which is that it is a specification for peer-to-peer communication of media and data, but it does not specify how signalling is done. Or put more simply, if you want call someone on the web, WebRTC tells you how you can transfer audio, video and data, but it leaves out the bit about how you make the call itself: how do you locate the person you're calling, let them know you'd like to call them, and a few following steps before you can see and talk to each other. WebRTC Signalling While this allows services to provide their own mechanisms to manage how WebRTC calls work, the lack of a standard mechanism means that general-purpose applications need to individually integrate each service that they want to support. For example, GStreamer's webrtcsrc and webrtcsink elements support various signalling protocols, inc
Notes from GStreamer spring hackfest of 2024
Jul 30, 2024 · original
Some time has passed since the GStreamer spring hackfest took place in Thessaloniki, Greece in the month of May. Second time attending the GStreamer hackfest and thought about summarizing some of my thoughts this time around. Thanks Before getting into the details, want to send out a thank you to: The GStreamer foundation for sponsoring the event as a whole Sebastian, Vivia and Jordan for making all the arrangements Asymptotic, for sponsoring my presence at the event The event At the hackfest . It was good to see some familiar faces at the event, folks whom I had met at the previous hackfest and conference. Also nice when you finally meet people you have only conversed with online and get to put a face on the online persona you have been conversing with. Work Originally the plan was to work on adding stream multiplexing support to QUIC elements. However, missed pushing some of the work t
Writing a simple PipeWire parametric equalizer module
May 7, 2024 · original
Motivation When using headphones or in-ear monitors (IEMs), one might want to EQ their headphones or IEMs. Equalization or EQ is the process of adjusting the volume of different frequency bands in an audio signal. Some popular EQ software are EasyEffects on Linux and Equalizer APO on Windows. PipeWire supports EQ via the filter-chain module. For an understanding of EQ, following resources might help. The Headphone Show - EQ Basics The Headphone Show - The Limits of EQ Graphs 101 - How to Read Headphone Measurements The basic idea is that there are some “standard” frequency response curves that might sound good to different individuals, and knowing the frequency response characteristics of a specific headphone/IEM model, you can apply a set of filters via an equalizer to achieve something close to the “standard” frequency response curve that sounds good to you. Websites like Squig or auto
Asymptotic: A 2023 Review
Mar 19, 2024 · original
It's been a busy few several months, but now that we have some breathing room, I wanted to take stock of what we have done over the last year or so. This is a good thing for most people and companies to do of course, but being a scrappy, (questionably) young organisation, it's doubly important for us to introspect. This allows us to both recognise our achievements and ensure that we are accomplishing what we have set out to do . One thing that is clear to me is that we have been lagging in writing about some of the interesting things that we have had the opportunity to work on, so you can expect to see some more posts expanding on what you find below, as well as some of the newer work that we have begun. (note: I write about our open source contributions below, but needless to say, none of it is possible without the collaboration, input, and reviews of members of the community) WHIP/WHEP
Supporting ALSA compressed offload in PipeWire
Mar 18, 2024 · original
Editor's note: this work was completed in late 2022 but this post was unfortunately delayed. Modern day audio hardware these days comes integrated with Digital Signal Processors integrated in SoCs and audio codecs. Processing compressed or encoded data in such DSPs results in power savings in comparison to carrying out such processing on the CPU. +---------+ +---------+ +---------+ | CPU | --- | DSP | --- | Codec | | | --- | | --- | | +---------+ +---------+ +---------+ This post takes a look at how all this works.
GStreamer for your backend services
Aug 3, 2022 · original
For the last year and a half, we at Asymptotic have been working with the excellent team at Daily . I'd like to share a little bit about what we've learned. Daily is a real time calling platform as a service. One standard feature that users have come to expect in their calls is the ability to record them, or to stream their conversations to a larger audience. This involves mixing together all the audio/video from each participant and then storing it, or streaming it live via YouTube, Twitch, or any other third-party service. As you might expect, GStreamer is a good fit for building this kind of functionality, where we consume a bunch of RTP streams, composite/mix them, and then send them out to one or more external services (Amazon's S3 for recordings and HLS , or a third-party RTMP server). I've written about how we implemented this feature elsewhere, but I'll summarise briefly. This is
Automate debugging using GDB scripting
Nov 13, 2021 · original
Recently I was working on a GStreamer plugin in Rust. The plugin basically rounds the corners of an incoming video, something akin to the border-radius property in CSS. Below is how it looks like when running on a video. The GStreamer pipeline for the same: gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location= ~ /Downloads/bunny.mp4 ! \ decodebin ! videoconvert ! \ roundedcorners border-radius-px=100 ! \ videoconvert ! gtksink This was my first time working on a video plugin in GStreamer. Had a lot to learn on how to use the BaseTransform class from GStreamer, among other things. Without getting into the GStreamer specific details here, I basically ran into a problem for which I needed to do some debugging for figuring out what was going on in the internals of GStreamer. Now, while I never had problems using GDB from the command line, but, the way I was using it earlier was just not good enough. I would star
Building a diverse team from the ground up
Aug 2, 2021 · original
It's 2021, and while many things have changed for the better, they haven't changed enough , particularly in technology. Right from the get-go, we knew we wanted to build a diverse company. Our founding team was balanced in gender terms. Our next hire was someone intimately familiar with the world we inhabited, and whom we knew through a Rust meetup that he organised. We are determined to ensure that our hiring pipeline reflects the world we live in (rather than the world we work in). We've had a broad set of people vet our hiring page to ensure that the language is inclusive, and welcoming. We've reached out to folks we know and asked them to help us reach under-represented members in tech. These are baby steps. We will continue doing our very best to build an inclusive, and welcoming space for everyone. We're acutely aware that gender is not the only axis of representation, and this is
Hello, world!
Jul 22, 2021 · original
We started asymptotic 2½ years ago, and have been fortunate to have had a wild and busy ride so far. Nevertheless, it's probably high time we introduced ourselves! :-) We are a small team of people who care about software freedom and take pride in their craft. Being tinkerers, we like working on low-level systems and are happiest when we're close to the metal. We contribute to open source projects upstream, and help companies use them in products that are useful to people in the real world. This allows us to produce a virtuous cycle of improving the projects we maintain, while ensuring that they solve real world problems. We want to live in a world where open source software is the default choice, and we aim to achieve that by making the projects we work on be the best option available. Together, we're building a diverse, inclusive and sustainable company. This may mean choosing to be sl

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