November 19, 2014

command line utility to cast to chromecast

So just a quick one today, found an awesome command utility to be able to cast content to a chromecast! It does local content, content from the interwebs and can even stream torrents :O

https://github.com/xat/castnow

Kudos to old mate xat for this one

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get it working from my raspberry pi yet :( Keep getting build errors when trying to install it via npm… I will update once I finally figure it out

Edit 1

So I didn’t get it working on my raspberry pi , but I recently upgraded (not sure its the right word :P) to Ubuntu 14.04. I have always wanted to be running Linux as my main desktop environment, but as I am a heavy gamer, I couldn’t do it because all my favourite games (CS:GO) were only on Windows.

But when I got the good news the other month that they had ported it over to Linux, I didn’t waste anytime. First I installed CentOS (big fan of the long term support, a guy I used to work with also worked on the earlier releases of this..) But I was having heaps of issues with drivers, and just generally being not nice, I sighed to myself and installed Ubuntu.

And it just worked. No issues have come up, even managed to get WOL working (couldn’t get it working on Windows), and the only thing left to do now is get SLI working for my dual GTX 690’s

Little bit off topic.. but I managed to easily get castnow installed on Ubuntu, and got it streaming youtube video and even torrents direct to my chromecast :D Pretty awesome stuff too. Next step is to plug my chromecast directly into power, so I can turn the TV on via the chromecast (TV is CEC compatible)

Edit 2

So good new everyone! After trolling the internet for a while, I finally found the missing piece to get castnow working from your raspberry pi. A post by Dudecalion on reddit shows that all I needed was a node version that was compatible with ARM (the one’s I tried from apt-get were old versions). So here are some instructions to get it working from your pi!

 wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.28/node-v0.10.28-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz

 tar -zxvf node-v0.10.28-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
 cd node-v0.10.28-linux-arm-pi/bin

 sudo su

 PATH="$PATH:/location/to/download/node-v0.10.28-linux-arm-pi/bin/"

 npm install -g castnow

And now wait. install took around 5 minutes for me, with a few warnings. But once it was done, you can Profit! As said in the post, because the pi isn’t that powerful it probably won’t be able to handle transcoding on the fly, so best to just keep it to playing youtube video’s or local mp4’s (but will happily be proved wrong!)