gstreamer-plugin-xwm

A GStreamer plugin that makes Microsoft xWMA (.xwm) audio files play in any GStreamer-based application — Decibels (GNOME Audio Player), Totem, Rhythmbox, etc. — with no special player required.

.xwm is a RIFF container (RIFF…XWMA) wrapping WMAv2 audio, used heavily by games (e.g. Skyrim/Bethesda titles). GStreamer already ships the WMA decoder (avdec_wmav2, from gst-libav), but .xwm files never play because nothing recognises the container or autoplugs a demuxer for it. This plugin fills exactly that gap.

What it provides

Feature	Description
xwma_typefind	Typefinder for the RIFF…XWMA magic + .xwm extension (rank PRIMARY)
xwmademux	Demuxer: parses the RIFF chunks and emits an audio/x-wma stream

Decoding is delegated to avdec_wmav2 via decodebin autoplugging. The demuxer synthesises the fixed 6-byte WMAv2 codec_data (00 00 00 00 1F 00) that xWMA files omit but the decoder requires.

filesrc ! [typefind] ! xwmademux ! avdec_wmav2 ! audioconvert ! autoaudiosink
          \________________ all autoplugged by decodebin/playbin _____________/

Building

Requires GStreamer ≥ 1.20, gst-libav (for avdec_wmav2), Rust, and cargo-c.

cargo cbuild --release
# Try it without installing:
GST_PLUGIN_PATH=$PWD/target/<triple>/release \
  gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=song.xwm ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! autoaudiosink

Install system-wide (drops libgstxwm.so into the GStreamer plugin dir):

cargo cinstall --release --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64

Fedora RPM

rpmdev-setuptree
git archive --format=tar.gz --prefix=gstreamer-plugin-xwm-0.1.0/ \
    -o ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/gstreamer-plugin-xwm-0.1.0.tar.gz HEAD
cp packaging/gstreamer-plugin-xwm.spec ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/
rpmbuild -bb ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/gstreamer-plugin-xwm.spec
sudo dnf install ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/gstreamer-plugin-xwm-0.1.0-1.*.x86_64.rpm

This installs libgstxwm.so to %{_libdir}/gstreamer-1.0/. Because xwmademux is rank primary, it then outranks libav's avdemux_xwma (rank marginal) so decodebin/playbin pick it automatically — giving correct duration and seeking.

Note on Decibels (and other flatpak apps): a flatpak is sandboxed and uses its own bundled GStreamer, so it will not see a host-installed plugin and will keep falling back to avdemux_xwma. Use a non-flatpak (RPM) build of the player, or build this plugin against the matching freedesktop SDK and expose it with a flatpak override.

Status

• ✅ Playback of WMAv2 xWMA via autoplugging (decodebin/playbin).
• ✅ Accurate duration and a complete progress bar (derived from the dpds index).
• ✅ Accurate seeking via the dpds index (TIME→byte mapping, per-packet timestamps).

License

MPL-2.0, matching the GStreamer Rust plugin convention.