MagicOnion VS catt

If you're in dotnet land, I'd recommend poking magic onion [0] or messagepack. It'll be much nicer to work with once you have a decent pile of message types. Otherwise it's easy to end up in an entity framework like situation where you're constantly serializing and deserializing, generating serializer wrappers, etc. Although any of the cysharp libs are great in dotnet, definitely recommend checking out their back catalogue.

[0] https://github.com/Cysharp/MagicOnion

Having used it on a previous project, I found maintaining the protocol buffers quite tiresome. However, if I wanted to use it again, I'd be inclined to look into the MagicOnion project, which, in its own words:

MagicOnion? https://github.com/Cysharp/MagicOnion

You might want to look into catt for Chromecast:

- https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt/

But I'm not aware of what the equivalent would be for Amazon-type casting

I wrote a wrapper around catt for playing music to my house speaker-groups. It also works with video but I don't use that as often so it might be buggy--better to use catt directly

- https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library

There might be other apps that effectively do the above, perhaps even streaming the file so you only need to wait for the first part of a file to transcode before it starts playing. I don't use Amazon devices but with Chromecast you can use catt, VLC, and possibly ffmpeg to do this. For example, you can use catt scan to find the IP address and then do vlc --sout '#chromecast' --sout-chromecast-ip=$ip --demux-filter=demux_chromecast --sub-file=my.srt my.mp4. Maybe something similar exists for Amazon.

> "Whatever app I use to play music needs to support chromecast audio."

If you can't find something pre-built that fits your specific needs, you could perhaps "quick and dirty" script yourself up something using "Cast All The Things" [catt@github][0] to talk to your ChromeCast devices, and maybe "Beets" [beets@readthdocs][1] to manage play / playlist commands and management of the music library itself, presuming some Python scripting skills on your part, or a willingness / interest in learning said skills.

[0]: https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt

CATT (which I wrote) does the same, except it supports whatever site youtube-dl supports (which is basically everything):

https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt/

I have used catt to control a Chromecast. If Kodi can be made to act like a Chromecast it would work, perhaps there's a plugin for that.

Have you tried https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt ? You can ssh to your pi and cast from the command line, give it a shot!