cast

small media cast platform for your humble abode

Prerequisites

tool	description
golang	to build the service app
flutter	to build the UI ( web already built in ./ui/dist/web)
docker (with compose)	to run the services

Build & run

Run these commands on the machine that is going to host the platform.

# build the service executable
$ GOOS=linux make build

# prepare environment file (see .env.example)
$ cat .env
FILE_BROWSER_PORT=8000
SERVICE_HOST=192.168.0.50
SERVICE_PORT=8080
WEB_PORT=9000
MEDIA_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/media/directory

# finally, run the platform detached
$ make run

# to get logs
$ curl "http://${SERVICE_HOST}:8080/logs" | jq
{
  "data": [
    "http://192.168.0.50:43403/log-2023-12-17_15-04-25.833.log"
  ]
}

Build UI

The UI is built & stored in the repo because at the moment, as far as I can tell, flutter does not support building on all architectures, including ARM for raspberry pi (the one I am using for deployment). Hopefully this will improve in the future, then the pre-built UI distribution can be removed from the repo.

To build the UI run the following command. Subsequent deployments will use the updated UI from ui/dist/.

$ make build-ui

# redeploy
$ make run

Further improvements

• add support for
  • other devices (only Chromecast supported)
  • other media sources (only local file system supported)
  • other file extensions (only .mp4 and .srt supported)
• add extra device operations (play speed, queueing, etc.)
• better service feedback
  • better errors (with source file/stack trace)
  • device logs in the app
• add device selection API & selection from UI
• fix bugs
  • fix 'no transition' error
• code TODOs