terminalcast 1.1.0

Cast local videos to your chromecast

Terminalcast

Command line tool to cast local video files to your chromecast.

Inspired by https://github.com/keredson/gnomecast

Supported media types

Checkout https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media for your Chromecast model.

Use ffmpeg to convert unsupported files to a supported format:

ffmpeg -i '{input_file}' -metadata title="{title}" -map 0 -c:v {video_codec} -c:a {audio_codec} -c:s copy '{output_file}'

Supported Chromecast versions

In principle this should work with any Chromecast which is supported by https://github.com/home-assistant-libs/pychromecast.

In practice, I discovered that a Chromecast with Google TV enables you to control the player via the remote control, which is very nice.

Installation

pip install terminalcast

Usage

Basic Usage

terminalcast my_video.mp4

Known Hosts

If network discovery fails (e.g. due to network restrictions), you can specify known Chromecast IPs:

terminalcast my_video.mp4 --known-hosts 192.168.1.50,192.168.1.51

Alternatively, set the environment variable TERMINALCAST_KNOWN_HOSTS:

export TERMINALCAST_KNOWN_HOSTS="192.168.1.50,192.168.1.51"
terminalcast my_video.mp4

How is it working?

Terminalcast creates a little HTTP Server at your current machine and serves your media file there. Then it tells the Chromecast the play the stream served at your IP with the corresponding path. That's it! (The devil is in the details.)

Terminalcast uses Bottle to create a small app providing the media file. This app is served by Waitress.

On the other hand Terminalcast detects and plays the media via PyChromecast.

For file information and conversion ffmpeg-python is used.