Thank you so much
restarting wireplumber/pipewire worked.
The error happened today, tried the command, and at first, no video would load at all, or Twitch’s website. It was weird. I closed Brave, reopened it, and videos were working again; much better than rebooting the entire laptop. I just had to restart my headphones again, which led me to conclude on a pattern I have noticed and think I should share:
I think the issue is on the headphones or the bluetooth service. I made a post about an issue I started getting with them for months here in Fedora Discussion (Bluetooth Service needs to be restarted to work) - TL:DR; my Soundcore Life Q30 wireless headphones and the bluetooth in my laptop started acting up out of nowhere, requiring me to run sudo systemctl restart bluetooth.service almost every time I turn and connect them to my laptop. I bought a new Bluetooth dongle and the problem persisted, nothing has fixed it yet. It is also a command I must run after rebooting, because the bluetooth never works after one.
Recently, during this week and the past days, I started noticing that the issue with the videos not playing in my browser was triggered right after connecting my headphones. The bluetooth might work or not in that moment, but, right when I connect them, the issue with my videos starts happening, and it seems to happen mostly after keeping them disconnected for hours. Throughout the day, I constantly connect and disconnect these headphones to my Xbox (with a cable only) and my laptop (Bluetooth) with no issues, it is only when I go to sleep and connect them to my laptop the next morning, or when they have been disconnected for too long because my gaming session was long, that any of both problems predictably happen afterward; either the Bluetooth one, or my videos in the browser not playing.
I’d also like to mention that my headphones have two configurations, they both appear as options when choosing the audio output device. One is the normal one, “Headset,” and the other one says “Handsfree,” whatever that means. The “Handsfree” mode sounds so bad, it’s like putting your ears on two Nokia 3310’s earpiece speakers. After restarting wireplumber/pipewire, (and this is something that happens very rarely when restarting the bluetooth or connecting the headphones too, like, once every 2 or 3 months, that rare), for some reason they defaulted to “Handsfree” and didn’t show the other option at all, “Headset,” prompting me to restart the Bluetooth service to get it working.
This potential relationship between wireplumber, pipewire, the brand of my headphones, bluetooth, etc is what I think might be helpful, but I am not sure, it might be a coincidence or the cause might be somewhere completely different, so, it’s just an observation.
I am also about to build a new PC, finally leaving this problematic laptop behind once and for all. Its screen finally gave in, I cannot close it or it will physically break. It was an honor, though, this laptop helped me graduate. I might not deal with these issues again, I blame my old and odd hardware most of the time when they happen.
