this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Check the groups the working user is included in, and make sure the non-working user is in those same groups. See if anything there.
Edit: Oh, you know what. I think this is probably Pipewire not starting for multiple users when multiple are logged in. On the non-working user, you need to start a unique Pipewire session for that user, because the other working user's session can't be shared by default.
No luck so far. When I use 'groups username' in the terminal to compare the groups of both users they are exactly the same. Interestingly neither show 'audio' or 'video' as a group that they're in - both users are only in 'username' and 'users'. Yet both are able to play video, and only one gets audio along with it... The behaviour is the same from a cold boot with only one user logged in as it is when there are two users logged in.
Yeah, see my edit. This is a Pipewire session thing. Each user needs a unique Pipewire session to do audio. Video has nothing to do with Pipewire.
Session rings a bell for me this https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/674496/how-to-reset-pipewire-settings#674499 worked
Boom, looks like it's sorted, thanks! I didn't have a ~/.local/state/pipewire/media-session.d/ directory, but I deleted ~/.local/state/wireplumber/ and then rebooted and all was well again 🤸
Any idea what might have caused the problem in the first place?
MPV is no longer responding to my keyboard shortcuts for media controls (play/pause etc). Not a biggie but understanding the issue might help me solve that too.
I switched from mint to cachy and took my home folder. But i cant say what truly caises it.
Yeah, it could have been something similar for me. I moved a lot of dotfiles over when I switched from Fedora to Debian. I don't remember bringing this one with me but it could have happened.
I had issues with media keys and ended up using a plugin to handle it: https://github.com/hoyon/mpv-mpris
This may not be the proper solution (since yours were working previously, mine never worked) but if you don't have any other suggestions it may work for you.
If you're not super up on your systemd commands, use systemctl --user (no sudo):