A modern Music Player Daemon based on Rockbox firmware

[2026.06.07]

Added

• CMAF (HLS + DASH) PCM sink — new rockbox-cmaf crate encodes PCM to AAC-LC (fdk-aac) and serves HLS + DASH manifests with fMP4 segments over HTTP; enabled via audio_output = "cmaf" (or "hls" / "dash") plus cmaf_http_port, cmaf_bitrate, and optional cmaf_segment_dir for mirroring artefacts to disk for an external origin (nginx, Caddy, CDN); registered as PCM_SINK_CMAF = 8 in firmware/pcm.c; surfaced as a virtual device selectable via /connect/cmaf with broadcast icons in the GPUI, Expo, web, and macOS device pickers
• Standalone HLS/DASH player — new crates/hls decodes .m3u8 / .mpd URLs and pushes PCM straight into the active sink via new pcm_external_write / pcm_external_set_freq firmware hooks (no pcmbuf, no codec dispatcher) so the same audio-output graph (cpal, AirPlay, Snapcast, CMAF, …) reroutes a Rockbox-internal HLS broadcast to any sink the user picks; PlayTrack / pause / resume / next / previous / seek / hardStop in crates/rpc detect an active HLS session and dispatch locally or forward to the broadcaster over gRPC so peers stay in sync
• Web UI: HlsAutoConnect attaches an <audio> element to /hls/master.m3u8 whenever the active device type is cmaf / hls / dash, and HlsVolumeControl adds a local browser volume slider; Docker default audio_output flipped to cmaf and port 7882 exposed; new Mintlify page documents the sink; GraphQL globalSettings.cmafHttpPort added

Fixed

• CMAF sink: encoder now bootstraps with a full SEGMENT_WINDOW of silence so hls.js / dash.js don't fatal on a fresh manifest; a dedicated silence-pacer thread keeps the manifest live between tracks without ever mixing into real-audio chunks; pcm_cmaf_start() is now called eagerly from load_settings / device connect so the HTTP endpoint binds before the first track plays
• Android HTTP streaming smoothness — cpal_thread priority boosted (setpriority(PRIO_PROCESS, tid, -19)) and NowPlayingService now acquires PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK + WifiLock while the daemon is running, eliminating the doze-induced stutters on Wi-Fi remote streams
• netstream: rb_net_len and rb_net_content_type now wait for open_done before reading stream state, so callers see the real length / MIME instead of -1 / empty when the HTTP open is still in flight
• netstream: removed TCP keepalive from the global reqwest client — keepalive probes were tripping middleware and aborting long Range reads on some CDNs
• netstream: non-blocking rb_net_open() returns a handle immediately while the connect happens in a worker; combined with TCP keepalive on the per-stream client (kept) and an EOF probe for servers that omit Content-Length, this unblocks both the audio thread and the UI on slow first-byte servers
• netstream: detect and reconnect on premature TCP EOF mid-stream — the prefetch thread now restarts the underlying request from the last known offset instead of declaring the stream dead, fixing mid-track cutoffs on lossy mobile connections
• netstream: seek Range requests now retry on transient errors; huge forward skips on servers that ignore Range fast-fail instead of redownloading the whole prefix
• netstream: 30 s hard timeout removed from read_into — the prefetch thread's own retry budget now governs how long a read can wait, so a brief stall no longer kills the stream
• pcm-cpal: DMA thread exits immediately on stream error instead of draining pcmbuf, so the next track / device switch can re-arm the sink without waiting for a stale flush
• cpal sink: recover from stream errors and break the push deadlock — error callback now signals the writer so pcm_cpal_push returns instead of spinning on a dead stream
• Android: larger prefetch buffer (16 MB) + more retries make HTTP streams resilient to Wi-Fi / cellular handoffs
• Navidrome HTTP track artwork — stream URL is now propagated as the track path and the bridge derives the cover-art URL from it, so artwork appears in the miniplayer, full-screen player, and queue without an extra round-trip

Changed

• Default Docker audio_output flipped to cmaf; port 7882 added to the exposed ports list so HLS / DASH playback works out of the box from a container

Fixed

• HTTP streaming: removed reqwest total-request timeout (only connect_timeout 15 s remains) — the previous 30 s deadline killed large remote files mid-stream; read_as_file() reverted to a retry-loop that fills the full requested buffer
• Buffering interleaving: fill_buffer() now passes BUFFERING_DEFAULT_FILECHUNK instead of 0 when a second handle has remaining data, so next-track pre-buffering round-robins with the current track instead of monopolising the buffering thread and starving the ring buffer
• HTTP pre-buffering cutting current-track playback: buffer_handle() caps HTTP handles to one BUFFERING_DEFAULT_FILECHUNK per call; streamfd.c replaces per-chunk fprintf(stderr, …) with logf() (compiled out in production) to eliminate hundreds of blocking write(2) syscalls per track
• Expo: Navidrome cover art now appears in the miniplayer, full-screen player, and queue when playing ND HTTP streams — coverArtUrlFromStreamUrl() added to navidrome-client.ts reconstructs a getCoverArt URL from the id, u, t, s parameters embedded in the stream URL; used as a fallback in trackFromProto when album_art is empty

Full Changelog: https://github.com/tsirysndr/rockbox-zig/compare/2026.05.28...2026.06.07