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Comment by TheWiseOne | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know of something similar for Windows?

Airflow works pretty flawlessly (not free software, however).

VLC since 3.0 is supposed to support Chromecast

yeah, but they don't support subtitles as far as i can tell. my frustration w/ VLC's casting is what drove me to write this.

Is there something amiss with VLC's Chromecast abilities? I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, but was really happy to see it in the changelog

Yeah, there is no subtitles support for now. It will be supported in the next release.

The new VLC never finds my chromecast, and this does right away. Apparently a lot of people are having nonspecific trouble with the new VLC feature.

You wrote on your product page:

"Chromecast only supports a handful of subtitle formats, .srt not included. But it does support WebVTT. So we extract whatever subtitles are in your video, convert them to WebVTT, and then reattach them to the video through Chomecast's API."

Did you attempt to get this ported to VLC?

I did not. But nor did I write the conversation code. That was an existing python lib.

VLC does not support certain formats. I haven't dug into it, but I don't think it supports transcoding video to a chromecast endpoint either.

Reportedly does.

>If media codecs are supported by your Chromecast device, VLC only acts as a streaming server (which is battery consuming). If not, VLC will transcode and stream media, which is highly cpu and battery consuming.

[1] https://geoffreymetais.github.io/features/vlc-30/#chromecast

also they're transcoding to V8 and webm. so pretty much transcoding everything.

No, VLC does the transcoding on the fly, and that's why it's not very easy.

i actually wrote this to transcode on the fly (if you look at the code there's "wait_for_byte" etc), but there are certain limitations i discovered. mp4 files have what's called a "MOOV atom" which is a descriptor stored at either the beginning or the end of the file. but you can only write it once you're completed transcoding. so that pretty much kills it for mp4. vlc uses webm which doesn't have this limit, but you can't put a h264 stream in a webm container, so you HAVE to transcode it to V8, which is slow as balls. (0.1x in my testing, tho you can force 1x if you accept lower quality.) considering almost no one has media in V8, i decided to opt for mp4. but it works if you switch it back to v8+webm.

Plex works on Linux/windows/OS X and does transcoding and subtitles, but I don’t know if it can directly cast from the PC or if you have to also run a client on your phone to start the the cast.

You can cast directly from your PC with it.

This works only in chrome though.

This is written in python. Anyone able to get this running under msys with gtk3, etc

i haven't tried, but you're right in theory very possible. i'm really a fan of OS specific GUIs tho - i'd advise someone use the same underlying python casting API to write a native windows frontend.

that said, not opposed to PRs that add support for it.

I really like that somebody has written in in Python. There is one similar tool which was written in NodeJS, I couldn't get that to work.

One question - Is the back-end modular enough, that anybody can read the source and write the front-end in PyQt?

yes. the whole thing's only like 500 lines of code. literally wrote it in about 2 evenings after work. should be easy to port to pyqt.

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