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Show HN: Gnomecast – A Linux Chromecast GUI with transcoding and subtitles
- spapas82 9y agoWhat 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)?
- Rondom 9y agoBubbleUPNP on the mobile. On the PC, depending on your use case, any DLNA implementation like Rygel (GNOME) or Kodi will do.
- beardbound 9y agoVLC can do that. Although I haven't tried it recently.
- vanous 9y agoI use screen stream, it's floss, can send data to any video player or open broadcast studio... but no audio, video only.
- vanous 9y agoForgot the link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.dvkr.screenstream https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.dvkr.scre...
- mastax 9y agoMiracast 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.
- petecox 9y agoThere'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 https://github.com/albfan/miraclecast
- Crespyl 9y ago> 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.
- maccam94 9y agoOddly 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 https://support.google.com/edu/castforedu/?hl=en
- nitrogen 9y agoHas anyone tried installing the extension from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-cast-for-education/bnmgbcehmiinmmlmepibeeflglhbhlea https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-cast-for-ed... without an education account? How is its use blocked?
- mcpherrinm 9y agoI'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.
- kalleboo 9y agoI 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.
- hackcasual 9y agoChromecast 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.
- jariz 9y agoOn 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/ http://www.airsquirrels.com/reflector/
- mikewhy 9y agoAirServer or Reflector.
- rasjani 9y agoBeen 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 :)
- cartercole 9y agoyou and me man but the client verifies the server has a certificate at least according to https://github.com/thibauts/node-castv2 https://github.com/thibauts/node-castv2
- TheWiseOne 9y agoAnyone know of something similar for Windows?
- haolez 9y agoVLC since 3.0 is supposed to support Chromecast
- keredson 9y agoyeah, 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.
- stryk 9y agoIs 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
- thresh 9y agoYeah, there is no subtitles support for now. It will be supported in the next release.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoThe 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.
- Fnoord 9y agoYou 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?
- juancampa 9y agoCan you cast a portion of your screen with this? What I'd love to do is cast a website which I can use as a "dashboard" with custom content
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoI am looking forward to trying it when I get home, does it support casting audio (eg. an mp3, flac, etc.) to a Chromecast Audio?
- keredson 9y agocasting a video's audio track to an audio device works. adding support for the audio container should be trivial. can you open an issue on GH for it so i can ping you when done?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoThere was already an issue in GH, but I added a little more detail to it. Thanks for a very cool project!
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoThis works great, thank you. Maybe I can stop dropping video files on a Chrome browser tab. Why does this work so easily but the new VLC still doesn't find my chromecast?
- keredson 9y agothanks! i'm with you on disappointment w/ VLC's latest release. normally they do great work and i love VLC overall, but i waited so long for the casting and it's buggy as heck, and still didn't do subtitles! (my wife's EAASL so it's important for us :) of course all i did was just wrap a GUI around an existing python lib that already worked great, so i really just did all the easy stuff.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoThe legwork on usability is what makes code into software. That GUI matters.
- kilroy123 9y agoSadly I agree. I had a lot of issues casting from VLC on mac OS.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago> Why chromecast support took so long > Chromecast support is everywhere and VLC took years to get it, right, but there are plenty of good reasons for it: > First of all, VideoLAN is a nonprofit organization and not a company. There are few developers paid for making VLC, most of them do it in their free time. That’s how you get VLC for free and without any ads! > Also, VLC is 100% Open Source and Chromecast SDK isn’t: We had to develop our very own Chromecast stack by ourselves. This is also why there is no voice actions for VLC (except with Android Auto), we cannot use Google Play Services. > Furthermore, Chromecast is not designed to play local video files: When you watch a Youtube video, your phone is just a remote controller, nothing more. Chromecast streams the video from youtube.com. That’s where it becomes complicated, Chromecast only supports very few codecs number, let’s say h264. Google ensures that your video is encoded in h264 format on youtube.com, so streaming is simple. With VLC, you have media of any format. So VLC has to be a http server like youtube.com, and provide the video in a Chromecast compatible format. And of course in real time, which is challenging on Android because phones are less powerful than computers. > At last, VLC was not designed to display a video on another screen. It took time to properly redesign VLC to nicely support it. The good news is we did not make a Chromecast specific support, it is generic renderers: in the next months we can add UPnP support for example, to cast on any UPnP box or TV! https://planet.videolan.org/ https://planet.videolan.org/ I'm sure it will get better, but give them some more time.
- bb88 9y agoI find it sad that this took several years to make, only because I had hoped when Google released the chromecast, it would be the "no-brainer" way to stream media to your TV. Sadly, it didn't work out that way.
- brettlangdon 9y agoThis is great! I personally have been using https://getvideostream.com/ https://getvideostream.com/ which I like, but awesome to see an open source alternative.
- pjmlp 9y ago> This is a native Linux GUI for casting local files to ChromeCast devices. Love it, good work.
- keredson 9y agothanks!
- Improvotter 9y agoI recently read about VLC supporting casting to cast devices. How would this compare?
- cynicalreason 9y agohaven't checked the latest version but 1 month ago there was no chromecast support in the stable release channel
- lorenzhs 9y agoVLC 3.0 was released last week and has Chromecast support. It's been in the beta channel for a long time, but apparently took a lot of work to get edge cases sorted etc.
- atomi 9y agoThere's also this python based cli caster https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt
- keredson 9y agonice! starred.