Disney Streaming Services (DSS) Main Menu

Main menu for a DSS-inspired streaming media application, written in Rust.

Getting started

To build this project on Windows, macOS, or Linux, you will need a recent version of the Rust toolchain at least version 1.46.0, at minimum, but versions 1.48.0 and newer are strongly recommended because they perform better with async code (rust-lang/rust#78410).

If rustup is available on your system, the included rust-toolchain file at the root directory of this repository should automatically fetch and install the Rust toolchain for you, if not already present on your system, as soon as you execute any cargo command in the shell.

The following external dependencies will also be required on your system:

• SDL2, for system window and render context management, input handling, and hardware-accelerated rendering.
• SDL2_image, for loading arbitrary image files as SDL textures.
• SDL2_ttf, for loading and rendering TrueType fonts as SDL textures.

Windows (MSVC with vcpkg)

vcpkg.exe install sdl2:x64-windows sdl2-image:x64-windows sdl2-ttf:x64-windows

macOS

brew install sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_ttf

Linux

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install libsdl2 libsdl2-image libsdl2-ttf

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -Sy sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_ttf

Compiling

To compile the application in release mode and start it, simply run this command in your terminal:

cargo run --release

To execute the included unit test suite, run:

cargo test

To generate HTML documentation for the public crate API, run:

cargo doc --open

Usage

The input controls for navigating the UI are listed below:

Action	Controls
Navigate menu	↑, ↓, ←, →
Toggle fullscreen	F11
Close window	Esc or "close" button

Project layout

Like many idiomatic Rust projects, this service is split into a binary crate (the main.rs file) and a library crate (lib.rs and the rest). This is to facilitate simpler unit and integration testing under Cargo, should we require more of it in the future.

The main.rs is a very thin shim over dss_menu::app::App, which manages the main loop, UI rendering, and drives the dss_menu::menu::Menu business logic forward.

There is also a single background I/O thread for fetching arbitrary files over HTTP and caching them in the OS temp directory, which is spawned on app startup; the implementation for this is located in src/fetcher.rs. This thread can process many async HTTP downloads concurrently without resorting to spawning one thread per connection, and sends completed files back to the main thread as they become available.

The JSON schema serde types are located in src/schema.rs and its submodules.

Assumptions

• This application will run on an OS with a system allocator available.

• This class of application is optimized for mobile devices or smart TVs, and as such should try to eliminate heap allocation and dynamic dispatch where possible, and also put the CPU to sleep when applicable to consume less power.

• This application will fetch and stream resources from the Internet as they become available while avoiding blocking the main loop, and may require some form of async concurrency in order to scale efficiently without spawning more than two OS threads, one for the application and another for network I/O.

• Cached files will not persist in between individual runs of the application.

Possible improvements

• Dynamically populate ref sets as they scroll into view (didn't quite have time to build a widget or callback for that). We are capable of parsing this data, though, since the schema types exist.

• Draw rectangular cursor of selected menu tile with rounded corners.

• Implement animations by passing the delta time between frames to Widget::update() and using linear interpolation in Menu::select_tile() to gradually select and deselect tiles.

• Load the video art MP4 files for use as background animations for the currently selected tile.

• Skip the SDL hardware-accelerated rendering context and offload even more manual rendering computations from the CPU to the GPU.

• Cache individually rendered TTF glyphs as SDL textures to make repeated text rendering faster, a la grimfang4/SDL_FontCache.

• Find (or write) an alternative async executor which allows for explicit handling of out-of-memory errors.

• Try to reduce heap allocations by using serde in zero-copy deserialization mode and adding a lifetime to the home.json AST (thereby using &str over String when possible).

• Perhaps the number of String and Url copies made during file fetching and polling could be reduced by sending references instead of values over the channel, but this would be really tedious to implement due to lifetimes, to say the least.

• Add text logging and/or profiling with Criterion.rs and cargo bench.

• Change App to contain a stack of States, rather than just one, and implement a pushdown automaton with switch/push/pop state transitions to create modal interfaces and other screens.

Third-party Rust libraries

• anyhow is used to eliminate boilerplate from error handling. This commonly used crate eliminates the need to create your own error struct or enum for application-type Rust projects (as opposed to library-type projects, where thiserror is more popular) and reduces the number of manual implementations of Debug, Display, From, and std::error::Error as well as conversions between them.

• flume is a MPMC channel library that fixes numerous bugs and deficiencies seen in std::sync::mpsc, and most notably works with mixed sync/async code. This library is used for passing data between the synchronous rendering thread and the asynchronous background I/O thread without blocking the main loop.

• fnv provides a faster and cheaper hashing algorithm than the Rust standard library, which is intended to be DoS resistant by default. We don't need this protection for local rendering uses, though, and fnv performs way better during hot loops where map accesses and inserts are frequent.

• futures-util contains common async traits not yet available in the Rust standard library (e.g. FutureExt, StreamExt, and so on) as well as the Abortable combinator and poll_fn() function used in tests.

• sdl2 provides native Rust bindings to SDL 2.0, as well as SDL_image and SDL_ttf for image loading and font rendering, respectively.

• serde and serde_json provide JSON deserialization with pretty good performance for consuming the DSS home.json API.

• reqwest is an async HTTP client used for fetching JSON and image files from the DSS API while the main thread is busy rendering. It happens to include rustls as an optional statically-linked pure Rust alternative to OpenSSL, which is nice because it eliminates one more runtime dependency and uses less memory.

• tempfile is used for locating the OS temporary directory and creating temporary files that delete themselves after dropping, a facility not provided by the Rust standard library.

• tokio is used to spawn multiple async tasks and join them concurrently while using minimal resources. Although Rust provides zero-cost async (in the C++ sense), it does not include an executor in the standard library to drive those futures, requiring users to choose one from Crates.io or write their own instead. This crate is compiled in single-threaded mode to stay lightweight.

• url is used for parsing URL values from strings, both at deserialization time and for use with reqwest.

• uuid is used only for type-safety while deserializing UUIDs from JSON.

Credits

Includes the Cocogoose Pro TrueType font family, which is free for personal use.