Chromecast URL Player • Hacker News Board

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#11

Post by samworm » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 3:55 PM UTC

fat0wl wrote: post #2

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...

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#12

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

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.)

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#13

Post by matbee » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 4:33 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #3

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!

Just use videostream. www.streamchromecast.com

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#14

Post by StavrosK » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 4:44 PM UTC

matbee wrote: post #13

StavrosK wrote: post #3

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!

Just use videostream. www.streamchromecast.com

Very useful, thanks!

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#15

Post by unreal37 » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 4:50 PM UTC

CSDude wrote: post #10

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!

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#16

Post by mkagenius » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 5:14 PM UTC

CSDude wrote: post #10

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.

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

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#17

Post by stronglikedan » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 5:15 PM UTC

CSDude wrote: post #10

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.

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

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#18

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 5:57 PM UTC

mkagenius wrote: post #16

CSDude wrote: post #10

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.

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

[deleted]

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#19

Post by smtddr » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 6:02 PM UTC

mkagenius wrote: post #16

CSDude wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#20

Post by thefreeman » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 6:03 PM UTC

CSDude wrote: post #10

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.

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!