search

jansmolders86 / mediacenterjs

A HTML/CSS/Javascript (NodeJS) based Media center
http://mediacenterjs.com
1.29k stars 245 forks source link

Chromecast support #62

Closed maherbeg closed 1 year ago

maherbeg commented 10 years ago

Could chrome cast support be implemented into the server? It'd be great to have a node based media center app that could cast to the Chromecast.

I have some example code of on the fly transcoding of mkvs at maherbeg/mkvcast The settings I've chosen only work for h264 files, but it does mean there is no drop in video quality and not much CPU usage involved as well.

jansmolders86 commented 10 years ago

Great idea Maherberg, Thanks a lot for sharing!

Chromecast support would be amazing! I definitely would love to support the Chromecast. What are the capabilities? Can you only send a video to the Chromecast or can it also act as a client? I don't have a Chromecast I'm afraid so I do not quite know what the capabilities are. Something like this could be usefull as well: https://github.com/benjipott/video.js-chromeCast

Thanks again!

helluvamatt commented 10 years ago

@jansmolders86, I have a Chromecast that has been whitelisted for development. I'll be forking your project and attempting to tackle this issue.

To answer your questions:

The Chromecast requires a separate device for control. It will need to communicate using the Google Cast API to send messages to the Chromecast. MediacenterJS would need to add some special Google Cast API code to it's player/remote. This is where the project you linked comes in to help.

The first thing that should be tackled is what is called the "receiver" application. This is a very simple player web page that is served on a whitelisted domain directly to the Chromecast. It is used to render the player that is shown on the Chromecast device itself. It simply makes use of HTML5 video to play content. It also has some JS code to interface with the Google Cast APIs to receive and play content.

The Chromecast supports a limited number codecs. So we will have to transcode video. I'm glad to see someone else had FFmpeg in mind. I have some ideas I'd like to try out on seeking, but I leave those on that issue.

jansmolders86 commented 10 years ago

That would be amazing!

Thanks for explaining how the Chrome Cast communicates with other systems. Luckily MCJS already transcodes all videos to a html5 ready format (mp4 using FFMPEG). So once the bridge between MCJS and the cast has been made things should work as expected.

Again thank you very much for helping out and if you encounter any problems or have any questions feel free to ask!

Jan

helluvamatt commented 10 years ago

@jansmolders86 FYI: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/02/chromecast-is-now-open-to-developers.html

ParkerdeWaal commented 10 years ago

Ops -- I responded to the wrong email.

Apologies.

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 11:43 PM, Parker de Waal parker.dewaal@gmail.comwrote:

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 11:31 PM, Matt Schneeberger < notifications@github.com> wrote:

@jansmolders86 https://github.com/jansmolders86 FYI: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/02/chromecast-is-now-open-to-developers.html

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/jansmolders86/mediacenterjs/issues/62#issuecomment-34029875 .

oisinlavery commented 10 years ago

Chromecast support is absolutely essential!

adamisntdead commented 7 years ago

Hows this issue going, cause I would like to have a look at it?

tracker1 commented 7 years ago

I'd had similar thoughts... where the "remote" would be a web-app (react), that would then update what was being displayed on the chromecast device(s). Had also thought it would be cool to support multiple chromecasts...

My thinking was this way I could use my relatively beefy desktop to support playback to the chromecasts in my home, instead of having a separate htpc necessary.

I think there's room for a lot of reuse with this project, but would likely need to be a separate project as the design construct would be relatively different. Thinking something like chromecast-media-server.

leocaseiro commented 7 years ago

I believe that repo should have some examples how to implement it https://github.com/googlecast/CastVideos-chrome

leocaseiro commented 7 years ago

I believe you are using videojs, so here we go:

https://github.com/benjipott/video.js-chromecast https://github.com/jgubman/videojs-airplay

jansmolders86 commented 7 years ago

While those plugins are a really amazing find and I thank you for them, I want to use it the other way around :) I want user to be able to cast a video to the media center. So in other words it has to act as a server, not a client

mmarquezs commented 7 years ago

So you want to be able from your phone or similar cast to the mediacenter. Google doesn't want that, it used to be possible but then they changed the api so people couldn't do that. Nowadays unless something changed the only way I think was cloning an existing chromecast. But honestly I haven't recently looked into it, the last time I checked that was all I found.

jansmolders86 commented 7 years ago

Yes, Sadly you're right, when this item started it was still possible. But unless Google changes there API, this one is dead in the water.

tracker1 commented 7 years ago

@jansmolders86 It's pretty sad, especially since some newer TVs support chromecast directly... my guess it's about DMCA, and Google needs to not support streaming to disk work around to placate to various content providers.