Relation to Roc Cast

About Roc Cast

Warning

Roc Cast is still under development. It will gradually evolve from Roc Droid.

Roc Cast is an end-user solution for connecting audio apps and devices on a home or office network.

Although being part of Roc Streaming ecosystem, it is a standalone project, separate from rocd and working on top of it. Roc Cast implements custom business logic specific to its use cases, with a user-friendly cross-platform UI.

It comes in two variations:

native UI for desktop and mobile;
web UI, suitable for headless systems.

Supported Roc Cast clients for each platform

Interaction with rocd

Roc Cast is implemented as a Flutter application that launches and controls a rocd instance on every computer where it runs.

Roc Cast communicates with its local rocd instance via REST API, and rocd instances communicate with each other via ZeroMQ for signaling and RTP for transport. The transport part is implemented by Roc Toolkit.

On mobile, rocd is "embedded" into Roc Cast app via a wrapper library, to gain it access to permissions acquired by the app. However, even though the daemon runs in the same process, Roc Cast still communicates with it via HTTP API the same way as it does on desktop, to keep the codebase uniform across platforms.

Note

Despite that rocd has HTTP API and web admin interface, they're not exposed to the user when a rocd is controlled by Roc Cast.

This diagram shows example setup where user has three Roc Cast/rocd instances:

Desktop computer (roc-cast launches rocd instance and provides native UI).
Android phone (roc-cast embeds rocd via a wrapper library and provides native UI).
Headless Raspberry Pi with Web interface (roc-cast launches rocd instance and serves a http server with web UI).

All three rocd instances discover each other in LAN and communicate via ZMQ and RTP.

Example Roc Cast setup

Platform	Native UI	Web UI (HTTP)
PC
Android/iOS
Embedded