With `node.always-process` mpv will force pipewire to continuously keep
driving the source node, even when paused, which causes a relatively
significant increase in power consumption due to frequent CPU wakeups.
I have tested mpv with this option disabled, both for music and video,
pausing and seeking around in various ways and could not notice any
problems with this option disabled. And with it disabled pipewire
properly becomes idle a couple seconds after video/audio is paused.
Pipewire documentation suggests that this option is largely useful for
JACK clients, which `mpv` isn't. Using GitHub-wide search it seems like
the other two notable uses of this property are really just SDL and
OpenAL. All other applications I use work well without this property
being set as well.
Note that this change does not affect the output devices differently as
far as I can tell. Both with and without `always-process` pipewire will
suspend the output device after some idle time and in case
`always-process` is enabled, it will redirect `mpv` to `Dummy-Driver`
instead.
Simonas Kazlauskas
1af136bceb