Chromecast URL Player | Hacker News Reader

Chromecast URL Player

vignesh.foamsnet.com

87 pointslgp17118851 comments

Sorry for the plug, but if anyone is interested, I made a local video player on Chromecast, which transcodes the videos on the fly. https://github.com/mustafaakin/cast-localvideo So anything that ffmpeg can convert can be played on Chromecast, not only .mp4 and .webm video.

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

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

Since ffmpeg is running your computer. "realtime" = As fast as your comp can handle. I'm sure my 10+ year old Dell celeron would be horrible but a modern Intel i7 will probably be pretty good.

I tested with a P8700 processor, it would be able to transcode a 1080p video with a very few lags. With i7 3630QM processor, it had no lag.

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

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!

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

VP8 encoder in ffmpeg is slow, for now I use h264

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

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

I was going to say that I'd love to use all these neat Chromecast tricks but I can't because of its (native) poor support for external subtitles but then I got really afraid of saying so as disagreements about popular techs in HN usually result in downvoting. Offtopic: is it just me who feel like that and often avoid commenting?

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.

And while we're completely derailed, is getting down voted such a big deal?

Say what you want and how you think, but be prepared to support your position with something more then conjecture and posturing. If in spite of providing support for your well articulated and argued position, you receive down votes, hopefully someone has left a reply that will help you to understand why others disagree with you. Take it as a learning opportunity. You don't have to change your opinion, but use what you learn to help you write your next comment.

Dissenting opinions on their own won't usually give you down votes, but unsupported inflammatory remarks will.

> 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

Dude, that's great, you'd be fixing a real issue that Chromecast has (in my opinion). I'll check it regularly to see how it goes, thanks for the effort :-)

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).

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

This already exists at https://dabble.me/cast. It was something I threw together just hours after the SDK was released. Mashable picked it up, too: http://mashable.com/2014/02/05/vidcast-chromecast-app/

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

Awesome! I literally had put on my calendar, after the SDK came out, that if after two months nobody had made a dead-simple player like this, I'd do it myself. Glad I didn't have to. ;)

Suggestion for a next step: wrap it inside an OSX .app or Windows .exe that also launches a local webserver on some random port, so you can stream local media to your Chromecast as well. (I mean, for us developers it's easy enough to set up an instance of Apache, but this would let my grandma use it too.)

Edit: question: 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.)

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.

Question - is it possible to have Chromecast play urls directly to flash files? For example youtube gives out embedded links such as "www.youtube.com/embed/26UvdxUII-0". I realize that isn't a .swf file url, but it works in my browser. Since youtube already has an app that plays to chromecast.. I'm more thinking of random flash players on websites.

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/

thanks, please can someone give more basic instructions on how to do this. I for e.g. love a cricket streaming site (flash based www.crictime.com). How do I extract the video url to play on chromecast?

thanks much.

the particular example that you want seems to use eplayer. it seems like it's a livestream and uses some proprietary protocol and is not as simple as fetching data from a URL and playing it back. So it's unlikely that you'll be able to watch this particular site for chromecast unless they (either crictime or eplayer) decide to publish an app that implements their proprietary protocol for chromecast.

thx for your quick reply. obviously a disappointment!. Please can you also tell how could i use the youtube-Dl link you gave away to extract url from flash based sites? Also is there a way to play live videos from youtube in chromecast. Currently, live streams in youtube appear to be unsupported?

thanks again!

Neat! I was looking for something like this. I had to use tab casting for some videos like Twit Live which is prone to struggling on low power CPUs and goes down if the laptop sleeps. This allows me to directly send the HLS stream URLs to the Chromecast with no CPU usage on the local machine.

Edit: The sleep part is still a problem. But at least it doesn't eat laptop CPU I guess.

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.

Thanks, got that bookmarked. It works except for the live stream, which I found casts well from the Twit Cast Android app. So between these two, Chromecasting is working out well for me.

Has nobody heard of Videostream?! It plays it with perfect quality without transcoding right as a Chrome App. http://www.streamchromecast.com

This is exactly what I needed, thanks! Does it stream the video directly, or is there transcoding? I might even be able to stream videos from my home server (which has an HTTP interface) directly!

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.

Don't you need the BubbleUPnP server for that?

EDIT: No you don't, wow, this is fantastic. Thank you!

How is performance?

I've been using BubbleUPnP for a few weeks now and Avia for a month or two before that. No issues really. I watched a 720p MP4 movie last night, no complaints.

Just use videostream. www.streamchromecast.com

Very useful, thanks!

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.

wasn't something like this made in the early days of chromecast & they either shut it down or it broke due to a firmware update? i think it was to stream video content from your personal network to chromecast

hm...... i've been assuming that even tho there's an SDK it is still a turf war. if it's actually open to open source development... woah. many possibilities...

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...

OT: How do hackers on here stream 1080P mp4's to a Chomecast without choppiness and lag?

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

How is this different from opening the URL in Chrome and casting from it?

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

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).

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

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).

Does Chromecast support mkv? If not, why?

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.

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