[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1081965: Debian 12 in VirtualBox with Intel HD Audio, PipeWire, and 4 GB RAM causes videos to fail loading

[Aaron Rainbolt]

Hmm, I'm able to reproduce this problem with Arch Linux, using
pipewire, pipewire-pulse, wireplumber, and Firefox. Were you using
pipewire-media-session instead of wireplumber by any chance?

Also, an interesting note - if I install pulseaudio along with
pipewire, I can get pipewire running by disabling and stopping all
pipewire services, starting pulseaudio, playing audio briefly, then
stopping pulseaudio and starting pipewire again. At that point I can
see that Firefox is indeed playing audio through pulseaudio by using
qpwgraph, and the audio plays correctly until next reboot. This "use
pulseaudio to initialize, then switch back to pipewire" trick also
works on Arch.

I think this is almost certainly an upstream bug.