Media Playback?

[acroyear]

There's lots of stuff about media capture (audio via microphone, and the camera api0, but I can't find anything on media playback. In particular my general outlet is making music clients for the Subsonic server (and compatible implementations of the API), so I'm looking at this for making a AppleTV app (one where the "write once run anywhere" idea means i can test a lot of it on web/desktop or mac native in the interm for feature work and then polish it later).

But i'm not finding any discussion in the docs on how to actually play a streaming audio URL.

[proggeramlug]

Thanks for raising this — you're right, only mic capture is wired today (perry/system — docs). There's some AVAudioPlayerNode scaffolding in the platform UI crates but it's not exposed and loads bundled files — wrong shape for streaming anyway. The correct Apple primitive for a Subsonic-style remote URL is AVPlayer + AVPlayerItem(url:) (network buffering, codec dispatch, AirPlay, Now Playing / Siri Remote).

Tracked in #351 — we'll land a first cut (Apple platforms + Now Playing + Siri Remote, with perry/media createPlayer/play/pause/seek/setVolume/onStateChange/onTimeUpdate) within a few hours. Android / GTK4 / Windows backends will follow shortly after.

[proggeramlug]

Update — perry/media shipped in v0.5.440 (just merged). Real implementations on 7 of 10 platforms with full Apple lock-screen / Siri Remote integration:

• macOS / iOS / tvOS / visionOS — AVPlayer + AVPlayerItem(URL:) + MPNowPlayingInfoCenter + MPRemoteCommandCenter. tvOS Subsonic client should work end-to-end on this — that was the use case you flagged.
• Android — android.media.MediaPlayer via JNI (sync prepare() on a worker thread; main-thread control)
• GTK4 / Linux — GStreamer playbin element
• Windows — Windows.Media.Playback.MediaPlayer (WinRT)
• watchOS / HarmonyOS / Web — stubs that link cleanly (createPlayer returns 0); tracked in perry/media: watchOS implementation #368 / perry/media: HarmonyOS implementation #369 / perry/media: Web (--target web) implementation #370

API: createPlayer(url) / play / pause / stop / seek / setVolume / setRate / getCurrentTime / getDuration / getState / isPlaying / onStateChange / onTimeUpdate / setNowPlaying(handle, title, artist, album, artworkUrl) / destroy. States: idle / loading / ready / playing / paused / ended / error.

Your ended-event reliability concern is addressed everywhere — both the platform native signal (AVPlayerItemDidPlayToEndTimeNotification / MediaPlayer.OnCompletion / GStreamer EOS / WinRT MediaEnded) AND a currentTime ≥ duration - 0.25s fallback set the same flag, so the state callback fires once per track even when the native event drops. Apple has been reliable in my testing but the same belt-and-braces is on every backend.

Docs: https://docs.perryts.com/system/media.html (deploys when CI lands; meanwhile the source is at docs/src/system/media.md).

Happy to debug if you hit anything specific in your Subsonic flow — file an issue and tag me.