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Comment by spapas82 | Hacker News Reader

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)?

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Oddly enough there's a Chrome extension that supports this, but it's restricted to Google Apps for Education users. https://support.google.com/edu/castforedu/?hl=en

Has anyone tried installing the extension from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-cast-for-ed... without an education account? How is its use blocked?

I'm on a "regular" Google Apps account (ie, grandfathered into the old free one aka gmail on a custom domain).

I can use this fine, with some gotchas:

It'll only allow different users on the same gsuite account to connect. I can't, for example, invite a personal gmail account or an account on a different gsuite domain.

We use Google Meet at work for meetings, which also supports "Casting to a meeting", but that requires gsuite as well.

I just tried it and it seems to work even though I don't have an Education account. I don't have any modern Android devices though so I just casted one tab on my laptop to another tab on my laptop.

On mac, I've used reflector in the past which makes your mac act as a chromecast receiver. But seems like it only supports screen casting.

http://www.airsquirrels.com/reflector/

BubbleUPNP on the mobile. On the PC, depending on your use case, any DLNA implementation like Rygel (GNOME) or Kodi will do.

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.

There's a 'MiracleCast' implementation for Linux. I'm not sure how mature it is but it aims to stream to and from your desktop.

https://github.com/albfan/miraclecast

> not sure how mature it is

I've been following the project for a while and the answer, unfortunately, is "not very". It does actually work as a sink (WiFi P2P discovery included) and there's a WIP branch with source support (eg for sending your screen to another device).

IIRC it still requires exclusive control over your WiFi card so it doesn't play nice with NetworkManager or similar, and it's just all around just not really ready for casual use. The main dev has been great though and the core functionality is shaping up nicely.

VLC can do that. Although I haven't tried it recently.

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 :)

I use screen stream, it's floss, can send data to any video player or open broadcast studio... but no audio, video only.

Forgot the link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.dvkr.scre...

you and me man but the client verifies the server has a certificate at least according to https://github.com/thibauts/node-castv2

AirServer or Reflector.

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