Amazon Echo Show as LMS 'Appliance'

As mentioned over at the MediaServer thread, I have now implemented a
persistent touch-capable display for when MediaServer is used with an
Echo Show. The LMS 'Appliance' as I call it.

I recently added an Echo Show 8 (2nd Gen, 2021 release) to my arsenal
and beheld a *2022 Squeezebox Radio beater*. It's like bolting on a
Touch in front of a Radio. For only $89 on sale (up to $129 if not —
still not bad) this thing sounds really nice for its size and of course
has that gorgoeus 8" full-HD touchscreen. Which also does 'normal Alexa
stuff and has a 13MP camera for Zoom calls.

In beta testing, I got the new touchscreen controls and metadata display
to work perfectly well with the -stream-commands (i.e. Echo itself is
audio sink for LMS), but of course the *buffering* came back to bite me.
I can trap a touchscreen event to clear the buffer so the music -starts-
instantly without latency, but the progress-bar -subsequently -runs off
the charts as the Echo gobbles up the stream into its buffer. It doesn't
take long before the Artwork and Metadata are off by a whole track. For
that reason, I've disabled the touch/artwork feature for streaming and
only released it for regular playback on non-Echo devices. Big Pity.

We've looked at starving/drip-feeding an Echo before to limit buffering
but gave up fairly quickly because the incentive of 'The Appliance' was
not there. Is it worth taking a new look, given the recent developments
in MediaServer?


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