Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

In this session, I’ll share practical lessons learned while architecting, building, and supporting a production media system running on custom hardware using open source systems :

Yocto for a customized OS;
GStreamer for media pipelines;
PulseAudio for audio routing;
BlueZ for Bluetooth integration;

This session is relevant because while projects like Yocto, GStreamer, PulseAudio, and BlueZ are powerful individually, integrating them into a production-ready system on custom hardware exposes complexities rarely covered in documentation. Sharing hard-earned lessons helps the ecosystem build more reliable open systems.

Main Points:
- System Overview : Hardware Constraints
- Yocto Custom OS Tradeoffs : Layer Strategy, Packet Selections, Reproducible Builds, Field Updates and Support
- Gstreamer : Pipeline design patterns, Handling dynamic audio devices
- PulseAudio & Bluez Integration
- Field Support and Long Term Maintenance : Logging Strategy; Remote Diagnostics, Managing Updates

Attendees will walk away with concrete integration patterns, design considerations for long-term maintainability, and insights that help when building real-world media systems on embedded Linux.