Live data from Hacker News

Chromecast URL Player

vignesh.foamsnet.com

21–30 of 54 posts

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#22
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?

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.

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#23
post #9

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.

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#24
post #9

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?

[deleted]

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#25
post #7
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!

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.

How is performance?

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#28

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…

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.

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#29
post #9

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?

> 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

Re: Chromecast URL Player

#30
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.

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