CastLocal

Cast any local video to Chromecast — from your terminal.

A CLI and retro TUI (Far Manager-style) for streaming local video files to Chromecast devices. Handles format conversion automatically with hardware-accelerated transcoding.

Why?

• VLC's Chromecast support is broken. Tab casting kills quality. This just works.
• Plays any format — MKV, AVI, MOV, WMV, FLV, and more. Transcodes on-the-fly.
• Hardware-accelerated H.264 encoding (VideoToolbox on macOS).
• Starts playing in seconds via HLS streaming — no waiting for full transcode.
• Two interfaces: quick CLI or a keyboard-driven TUI with a dual-pane file manager.

Install

pipx install castlocal

Or with pip:

pip install castlocal

Requires ffmpeg on your system: brew install ffmpeg (macOS) or apt install ffmpeg (Linux).

Usage

CLI — cast a file directly

cast movie.mkv                  # auto-discovers device
cast movie.mp4 -d "Living Room" # target a specific device
cast -l                         # list available devices

Playback controls: [p]ause [f/b] ±30s [+/-] volume [q]uit

TUI — Far Manager-style interface

cast-tui

• Left pane: browse local files (video files highlighted in green)
• Right pane: discovered Chromecast devices (shown as folders)
• F5 to cast, F8 to stop, F9 to rescan, F3 for file info

Navigate with arrow keys, Tab to switch panes, Enter to select.

How It Works

1. Discovers Chromecast devices on your network via mDNS/Zeroconf
2. Probes the video file — if it's already MP4/H.264, streams it directly
3. If not, transcodes to H.264+AAC using ffmpeg with HLS segmentation
4. Serves segments over HTTP as they're encoded — playback starts in seconds
5. Casts to the device with full playback controls

Supported Formats

License

MIT