Chromecast URL Player (opens in new tab)

Thanks for sharing. You should post it in the group for cast developers: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/11574215756910358545...

Transcoding is tough for processors in case of high definition video, does your app really do it in realtime?

Thanks! I have been working on a similar project of my own which focuses on remote files, and was having issues with streaming the files while transcoding was still in progress. This should help a lot!

Can this be publicly hosted if you already have a compatible video and remove the transcoding?

Excellent, and thank you. I wouldn't have found this without your shameless plug.

No need to apologize. That's super useful too!

that's neat. i haven't looked at the code, what's your target video codec for transcoding? is it VP8?

> I'd love to use all these neat Chromecast tricks but I can't because of its (native) poor support for external subtitles

author here. yes, i have been working on adding subtitle support to this web app as well (you paste two urls, one for the video and one for the srt file). chromecast supports WebVTT [1] and it's pretty straightforward to convert srt to WebVTT. Although, it requires using a custom receiver app. stay tuned.

[1] https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media

If you are worried about downvotes, be more subjective. If you mention you had bad experiences with the feature, or whenever you used it it didn't meet your needs, or ask if anyone knows a way to work around the limitations you are seeing, you're pretty safe. If you come out with a definiteive statement such as "it has crappy subtitle support" you are going to have your comment assessed differently. You'll probably get more votes, up or down depending on how many people agree or disagree with you, but that's the nature of polarizing statements.

It's not that different than speaking in person actually, except you don't have to pay attention to the reactions of others to see how your statements went over (in aggregate).

You didn't want to comment because you don't want to be downvoted? Yeah, I don't think that's rare.

Although posting a comment saying that you decided not to comment because everyone would downvote you is likely a very good way of... getting downvotes.

Plex.tv does a great job with subtitles already, and they just opened up the Chromecast support to all users for free.

There are several Android apps which will stream MP4s to the Chromecast from a upnp/dlna server. I use BubbleUPnP but Avia is another one.

Just use videostream. www.streamchromecast.com

author here. there is no transcoding. i wrote this to scratch the same itch. i have a media server which has a http interface too. plex somehow thinks it needs to transcode some videos despite chromecast being perfectly capable of playing them back as it is. i play such videos using this app.

Doing that requires transcoding and generally has very bad performance for me, this doesn't look like it does that (but I haven't tried it yet).

Casting a chrome tab typically means re-encoding your screen frame buffer, sending it to chromecast and decoding it there. Whereas this app merely pulls the video off the URL and decodes it in the chromecast. Your system has no load and it can even be turned off when the video is still playing back (although you'll have no way to control it).

Looks like its streaming arbitrary video URI's without needing to fullscreen the tab

When I do that chrome-tab-cast, the performance is terrible.

No, chromecast cannot play flash videos. But you can extract the URL of the videos from common swf based players like JWPlayer using a tool like youtube-dl [1] and then use that URL to playback the content in chromecast. This will probably make a good chrome extension.

[1] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/

You might check out VidCast at http://dabble.me - it has a bookmarklet compatible with Twit.tv making your experience with finding a video on Twit.tv & casting it to your TV a bit more streamlined.

not sure what you mean by this. but streaming a 1080p url (e.g. by using this web app) via http works fine on a chromecast without choppiness and lag.

Videostream, www.streamchromecast.com

That's an interesting URL...I remember using that last year.

author here. thanks that it's helpful.

> does anyone know if it's technically possible to cast a video to Chromecast, but leave the audio playing on my local computer? (Necessarily involving some kind of audio delay.)

yes, it's technically definitely possible. one way is to use ffmpeg to remux the video alone and pass it on to the chromecast while playing the audio along locally. you can use the chromecast api to fetch the playback location of the video and use it to sync the audio locally.

Since they opened the SDK you've been able to do most (all?) the stuff people were initially excited about. The problem is that all the excitement has long since died away so very few people are developing versatile Chromecast apps... and the ones that are out there are mostly buggy and poor designs.

AllCast [1] is probably the most well known despite being crippled (limited to 1 min playback I think?) unless you pay.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.koushikdut...

yes, it does support the mkv container. WebM and MKV files are usually parsed with the same parser. So pretty much any player that can play WebM can play MKV given the encapsulated codec is supported.

disclosure: i work on the Chrome team but have nothing to do with chromecast.