I'm curious what people's thoughts are about Matter. This is the first I'm hearing of it.

I've been trying to find a way to replace my old Chromecast Ultra (because Google), but I really like having that little cast button show up in apps, even on the phones of guests. But from what I can tell, Google killed this functionality on open alternatives (ex. Raspicast) with a lockdown to the Chromecast spec.

I'm hopeful that Matter could be a way to have my devices cast streams to each other in a standardized way that wouldn't require me to rely on Google/Apple/Amazon/etc. Maybe even Newpipe could get in on the action?

I don't know how it will work, or if this "Connected Standards Alliance" (which is apparently used to be the ZigBee Alliance, also news to me) will still have to greenlight specific devices despite it being "open", which would rule out Newpipe. I would assume the official YouTube apps will be particularly resistant to supporting Matter.

Anyone have any experience here? Has anyone else successfully replaced their media device with something open that also works with the casting button in apps?

I'm trying to wrap my head around the pipewire ecosystem. I think it's great that we're getting a fully featured audio system with all the upsides of pulseaudio and jack, and none of the downsides (that I know of), plus a bunch of completely new features. However, I can't help but think it could have used a little more vision in its interface (or maybe just qpwGraph).

From what I've read, my mental model is that pipewire holds the graph, while a "session manager" manipulates it (create/modify/remove new nodes/ports/links/etc). That's fine. I also understand that wireplumber is such a session manager, and despite having a really convoluted config syntax, it does its job (I assume).

As a simpleton, though, I'm drawn to the wysiwyg interface of qpwGraph, but it's not clear to me how it's supposed to fit into pipewire's vision or how it interacts with wireplumber. It seems to render the current pipewire graph as it is, it can create/remove links between ports, but also it's not a session manager (right?).

I suspect that whatever I can do in qpwGraph I could also do using just wireplumber via conf files and the cli. But dragging my mouse between nodes is so much easier than learning a new syntax. But then I also don't understand what "Active" and "Exclusive" mean. I'm guessing that if Active isn't checked, it won't do anything at all, but if Exclusive isn't checked then...maybe wireplumber can override it? Does that mean if Exclusive IS checked it's able to override wireplumber (look at me, I am the session manager now)? Is that why, if I have a qpwgraph active that links VLC to both OBS and my headset, I hear/see a delay of the link to my headset when a VLC process launches? First wireplumber decides where it should link, and then qpwGraph modifies it several ms after?

I feel like it's currently not clear what qpwGraph is in pipewire terms, but it's also clearly the most intuitive way for someone to use pipewire right now. I think it would be best if qpwGraph was either a standalone, fully featured session manager (not to be used in combination with wireplumber) or just a front end for wireplumber rather than talking to pipewire directly.

Thoughts? Anyone else confused? Am I missing a piece to the puzzle?