I installed Kali 2025 on VMware Workstation and encountered an issue where videos on YouTube and Coursera were incredibly choppy and stuttering, with no audio. However, I noticed that video playback worked fine when I disabled audio on YouTube. After trying various guides, I finally found a solution that fixed the issue.
Stuttering Audio (in Virtual Machine)
Normally this should not happen but is usually caused by jittery drivers. In a VM
this is most common because the device is emulated.
you can usually fix this problem by giving more headroom in the alsa device
ringbuffer.
You need to edit the WirePlumber configuration as follows (since 0.5, the older 0.4 version
uses lua scripts for configuration):mkdir -p ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/
cd ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.dThen make ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/50-alsa-config.conf in an editor and
add:monitor.alsa.rules = [
{
matches = [
# This matches the value of the ‘node.name’ property of the node.
{
node.name = “~alsa_output.*”
}
]
actions = {
# Apply all the desired node specific settings here.
update-props = {
api.alsa.period-size = 1024
api.alsa.headroom = 8192
}
}
}
]Afterwards, restart everything via systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse
Source : Troubleshooting · Wiki · PipeWire / pipewire · GitLab
I hope this will help people who are trying to fix this issue.