spa-monitor

spa-monitor FILE

spa-monitor is a small debugging utility shipped with PipeWire. It loads a SPA (Simple Plugin API) shared-object plugin and instantiates a device object from it so that developers can observe how the plugin enumerates hardware, advertises nodes, and emits events.The tool is not intended for end users; it exists to help plugin authors and PipeWire developers verify that a SPA plugin initializes correctly, exposes the expected interfaces, and reports devices on the system bus. Running spa-monitor against a plugin prints diagnostic output describing the devices discovered and any errors encountered during instantiation.Typical usage is pointing it at one of the plugin libraries under /usr/lib/<triplet>/spa-0.2/ to inspect how that plugin behaves on the current machine.

FILE

Path to a SPA plugin shared object (.so) file. The plugin is dlopen'd and a device is instantiated from it.

spa-monitor is a debugging aid: it is only useful to developers working on PipeWire device plugins. The program takes no flags and produces output that is only meaningful in the context of the SPA plugin API. It is shipped in the pipewire-bin package on Debian/Ubuntu and pipewire on Arch.

Developed by the PipeWire project as part of the SPA plugin framework. PipeWire was created by Wim Taymans at Red Hat starting in 2015 as a unified server for audio and video on Linux, intended to eventually replace both PulseAudio and JACK for media handling.

pipewire(1), pw-cli(1), pw-dump(1), wpctl(1)