What I would really like (but was never able to find) would be the opposite direction, i.e cast things from me phone (or laptop) to a program running on my PC (or my android device) - i.e a software "chromecast".
Is anybody aware of such an application (that actually works)?
Chromecast itself is locked down, you need to authenticate to a sender, so don't expect a software compatible version. You can use a capture device however.
Miracast could work for that. Most Windows laptops support it as source and destination. Android phones support it as (just?) source. Recent-ish smart TVs should support it. It's got some of that "open standard" flakiness, but it's basically open-chromecast.
Been writing a toy project like that. App on PC listen to pushbullet stream and when url matches given criteria, it will then send the url to chromecast. Not finished, not even working yet :)
This works great, thank you. Maybe I can stop dropping video files on a Chrome browser tab. Why does this work so easily but the new VLC still doesn't find my chromecast?
> Chromecast support is everywhere and VLC took years to get it, right, but there are plenty of good reasons for it:
> First of all, VideoLAN is a nonprofit organization and not a company. There are few developers paid for making VLC, most of them do it in their free time. That’s how you get VLC for free and without any ads!
> Also, VLC is 100% Open Source and Chromecast SDK isn’t: We had to develop our very own Chromecast stack by ourselves. This is also why there is no voice actions for VLC (except with Android Auto), we cannot use Google Play Services.
> Furthermore, Chromecast is not designed to play local video files: When you watch a Youtube video, your phone is just a remote controller, nothing more. Chromecast streams the video from youtube.com.
That’s where it becomes complicated, Chromecast only supports very few codecs number, let’s say h264. Google ensures that your video is encoded in h264 format on youtube.com, so streaming is simple.
With VLC, you have media of any format. So VLC has to be a http server like youtube.com, and provide the video in a Chromecast compatible format. And of course in real time, which is challenging on Android because phones are less powerful than computers.
> At last, VLC was not designed to display a video on another screen. It took time to properly redesign VLC to nicely support it. The good news is we did not make a Chromecast specific support, it is generic renderers: in the next months we can add UPnP support for example, to cast on any UPnP box or TV!
I understand why it took so long, but the implementation in VLC3.0 doesn't work for me. It never finds my Chromecast and I have no idea why. This app seems so far to work flawlessly.
thanks! i'm with you on disappointment w/ VLC's latest release. normally they do great work and i love VLC overall, but i waited so long for the casting and it's buggy as heck, and still didn't do subtitles! (my wife's EAASL so it's important for us :) of course all i did was just wrap a GUI around an existing python lib that already worked great, so i really just did all the easy stuff.
casting a video's audio track to an audio device works. adding support for the audio container should be trivial. can you open an issue on GH for it so i can ping you when done?
VLC 3.0 was released last week and has Chromecast support. It's been in the beta channel for a long time, but apparently took a lot of work to get edge cases sorted etc.
I find it sad that this took several years to make, only because I had hoped when Google released the chromecast, it would be the "no-brainer" way to stream media to your TV. Sadly, it didn't work out that way.
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Is anybody aware of such an application (that actually works)?
http://www.airsquirrels.com/reflector/
https://github.com/albfan/miraclecast
> Chromecast support is everywhere and VLC took years to get it, right, but there are plenty of good reasons for it:
> First of all, VideoLAN is a nonprofit organization and not a company. There are few developers paid for making VLC, most of them do it in their free time. That’s how you get VLC for free and without any ads!
> Also, VLC is 100% Open Source and Chromecast SDK isn’t: We had to develop our very own Chromecast stack by ourselves. This is also why there is no voice actions for VLC (except with Android Auto), we cannot use Google Play Services.
> Furthermore, Chromecast is not designed to play local video files: When you watch a Youtube video, your phone is just a remote controller, nothing more. Chromecast streams the video from youtube.com. That’s where it becomes complicated, Chromecast only supports very few codecs number, let’s say h264. Google ensures that your video is encoded in h264 format on youtube.com, so streaming is simple. With VLC, you have media of any format. So VLC has to be a http server like youtube.com, and provide the video in a Chromecast compatible format. And of course in real time, which is challenging on Android because phones are less powerful than computers.
> At last, VLC was not designed to display a video on another screen. It took time to properly redesign VLC to nicely support it. The good news is we did not make a Chromecast specific support, it is generic renderers: in the next months we can add UPnP support for example, to cast on any UPnP box or TV!
https://planet.videolan.org/
I'm sure it will get better, but give them some more time.
Love it, good work.
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I personally have been using https://getvideostream.com/ which I like, but awesome to see an open source alternative.