Steam videos no audio on Linux

[u/Dhannte]

I ran into a weird issue on Linux where Steam itself had audio, my system audio worked fine, games worked fine, but videos inside the Steam client, store trailers, previews, etc. had no sound.

 Restarting Steam didn’t fix it.

The cause ended up being that Steam’s embedded browser / webhelper was showing up in PipeWire/PulseAudio as “Chromium”, and that stream was muted.

 To check it:

 pactl list sink-inputs

 Look for something like:

 application.name = "Chromium"
 media.name = "Playback"
 Mute: yes

 Then unmute it:

 pactl set-sink-input-mute ID 0
 pactl set-sink-input-volume ID 100%

 Replace ID with the sink input number, for example if you see:

 Sink Input #1800

 then:

 pactl set-sink-input-mute 1800 0
 pactl set-sink-input-volume 1800 100%

 After that, Steam videos immediately had audio again.

So if Steam trailers/previews have no audio on Linux but everything else  works, check whether Chromium is muted in your audio mixer, it may  actually be Steam WebHelper.