Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

> Can stream to Chromecast devices, even in formats not supported natively

So excited to stream media to my TV via a non-crapware application.

I have been jumping between Videostream, Plex and VLC nightly in the last few months. They seem to play all kind of video files but subtitles remain to be a hard problem. VLC simply doesn't support it (or I didn't figure out how to enable subtitles). Videostream is buggy. Plex works with a specific version only (had to downgrade to get back subtitles)... The search continues I guess.

I've been using SodaPlayer for a good chromecast+subtitles support! It's not as feature rich as VLC, but it gets the job done

We have an ugly patch for subtitles over Chromecast. It will get there.

Is Chromecast support only on Android? Or will it work on Mac too?

How is Videostream buggy for you? I've been trying Videostream, VLC nightlies, and Emby. The latter two were buggy for me, but Videostream (although it is just Chrome embedded rly whatever that's called) works. So I just went for a one-time Premium tax and now I can stream. Including with a remote from my Android phone.

PS: and it has Opensubtitles support. I do sometimes have to resort to using VLC to grab subtitles (for a diff language) but even VLC sometimes does not work. Then I gotta resort to, well, a web browser to grab the sub.

I think their node app has issues with Little Snitch on my laptop.

I've found plex has a great interface, but performance when streaming to chromecast is not great

Wholeheartedly recommend Airflow: https://airflowapp.com

Has always worked perfectly, even with 4k high-bitrate video. Supports subtitles and can even fetch them for you.

Second Airflow - fantastic app on both Windows and Mac. I donated.

What did you have to downgrade? Subtitles work fine with the Chromecast on the most recent version of plex?

I was running 1.9.6, after an auto update to 1.10.something subtitles stopped working on Chromecast. I looked around and found a thread[1] with many people reporting the issue with many versions of Plex. One guy said he reverted to have it working again so I tried that and... it worked! I haven't updated Plex since then. Good to know that you have subtitles working with the latest version, maybe I will update when I get home, fingers crossed!

[1]https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/288806/plex-losing-subtitl...

I like plex, despite its mysterious failures during streaming (dropped wifi, stuttering on old-generation chromecast). The UI is clear, easy for me to organize, and sub-organize things for my kids to use.

Story time: this past summer I wanted to travel from Canada to Florida (3 days 2 nights) with just me and two young kids. To save on airfair I decided to drive. I bought myself the dlink DIR-505, one of those vehicle power bars, packed my laptop running plex, plugged in my portable drive that houses all my media, and I had a mobile hotspot the kids connected to from each of their devices to watch movies using plex, it was intuitive enough for them to use. With each having headphones, I even streamed my music to the car's bluetooth using plex. We went for 12hrs on our longest day, it was a huge relief from the boredom at times.

I've never had a problem with subtitles though, can you explain what you mean?

For a standalone Python program, I have good results with Cast All The Things, which plugs into youtube-dl.

https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt

This is also useful in case the amazon/google spat flares up again.

With this I guess it should be possible to daisychain from twitch to chromecast via vlc if they start another game of brinkmanship over access to video.

Absolutely. You can play any Twitch stream from VLC and cast it on your TV.

Is this possible without https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink ?

yes

You don't have to dig around for the underlying video stream, you can actually just paste a twitch stream link straight into the vlc network stream dialog, I'm not sure what magic it does but that's worked even well before this new version.

In case you're confused, eterm was just proposing this as an option. At this time the Twitch app does support casting from the desktop, Android, and iOS [0]. This roundabout solution would only be needed if Amazon decided to remove that functionality.

[0] - https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1691460-chro...

Which is very useful, since Twitch's Roku app is complete and utter garbage.

And, in fact, discontinued.

I've found videostream[1] to be amazing. Kind of sucks for the small team making it that VLC has this built in now, but I guess their startup was always on shaky grounds.

1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videostream-for-go...

I've had issues with Videostream, but it worked ok.

I don't think it sucks per se - VLC was always publicly planning to add Chromecast support (it's been out on a couple platforms for a while, just not the ones I care about)

Yup, I've been using videostream for years now. Seems like Chromecast support in VLC was always just around the corner, glad to see it's finally out there.

If you need this on a regular basis, check out Emby or Plex. They do transcoding on the fly for your entire media collection and fetch metadata online automatically for a really nice browsing experience. I certainly wouldn't describe either as crapware.

VLC does seem great for a one-off use case though.

Emby is awesome, unfortunately it has really low performance on Linux and they don't support raspberry pi.

Raspberry Pi works via Docker, and the previous non-Docker version also worked. I'm using it on 3 Raspberry Pis.

And on raspberry pi, with my video collection, is so slow as to be unusable.

No offense, "my video collection" is vague. What are you trying to watch? With which applications? Like, do file file_name_of_file_which_doesnt_work and post it here, or on their forums. For MPEG2 and VC-1 you need a license key for hardware acceleration. [1] They already give you a H264 license with the device but I think the default ffmpeg doesn't have support for OpenMAX by default. So you gotta compile ffmpeg with that. Instructions are on the forums.

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com