media-operator

media-operator plays films, series, and music on the screens and speakers of a liken cluster, and lets a remote control them. You declare each unit of equipment, such as a TV with its speakers, as a Player, and you start playback by creating a Play on it. A Remote connects a controller to the players it drives.

Things you can run this way:

• a film on a TV with a surround pair, the picture on the TV and the sound on the speakers,
• an album on a lone speaker,
• a season of episodes, played in order to the end,
• any https:// stream, nfs:// export, claim:// volume in the Play’s namespace, or a pattern:// test pattern that the player image carries.

Start here:

• Install the operator . The install applies the manifests that this site serves at /deploy/ , so you don’t need a clone.
• Declare a Player for a screen and its speakers, and prove that it plays.
• Map a new controller when its buttons do the wrong thing.
• Reference : each resource, its fields, and its topics on the message bus.

How it works

The API has five resources:

• A Player is one unit of equipment in one place: a lone speaker, a TV with its own speakers, or a TV with a receiver. It selects its screen, speakers, and GPU with the same CEL selectors that a hand-written ResourceClaim uses.
• A Play is one run of media on a player, like a Job: a film, an album, or a season. Create it to start, delete it to stop, and kubectl get plays lists what’s playing now.
• A Remote is one physical controller, bound to the players it drives.
• A Keymap maps one controller model’s buttons to media actions.
• MediaPreferences holds the cluster’s default audio and subtitle languages.

For each Play, the operator starts one pod that runs mpv , with claims on the Player’s devices. It claims the speakers and the other devices only while the Play runs, so other workloads can use them in between. Between plays, each Player’s idle pod keeps the screen: it shows a clock and the player’s name, and fades them after a few minutes with no activity. You can also have the operator turn the panel off after longer, when display-operator serves the screen.

Each Remote has its own pod, which sends button presses to the cluster’s message bus , and the playback pod acts on them. Your own programs can use the same bus. The operator also ships a capabilities agent, which publishes what each GPU can decode, encode, and scale, as media.liken.sh devices, so a pod can claim a GPU that decodes 10-bit HEVC, for example.

media-operator is one of the extension operators for running a home theater . It plays what you name in a Play. library-operator adds a catalog of your films and series, and a browser on the screen to pick from it.

• The source
• The liken manual