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.d
Then 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
Hi there, I tried your FIX on the stuttering audio in Kali, followed the instructions to the letter, but still I’m getting the same issue even with a reboot scratches head can anyone advise me on what else I should try, yes kali in in a VM and I’m running version 2025.2 rolling and I have updated it today
In the post from hs123 above, there is no indentation in the text, in any programming language, indents matter.
If you follow the given link to the gitlab page, you will find a post With the needed indents, create and save the file with the indents, then reboot, it should then work.
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
}
}
}
]
The truth of the matter is that this stutter in vmware when playing video has been known for a long time. Some fiddle around with gpu memory, some with browser settings, some with pipewire, some with more esoteric ideas.
Its exists for a really long time now and while some people claim to have solved it for them - no solution presented itself that worked for everyone so far.
None.
This isn’t a kali issue by the way, it happens with lots of linux distros in vmware.
Until vmware fixes this, the only workaround for everyone is “do not play videos in your guest vm, play them on the host”
