How to stream to Chromecast using VLC

chromecastvlc

I just downloaded VLC 3.0 Beta (using ubuntu ppa) and I wanted to know how to set it up to stream to chromecast. It's in the repo's NEWS that the feature has been added. Numerous news outlets are covering it. But, there is no example of how to actually use it yet.

I know it's not in the GUI (having searched the source code). And, I have no idea how to use the code from the command line.

Here is the Ubuntu PPA that I used to install it. However, it shouldn't matter. Nor, should the OS or system matter. It's just software. You can build it yourself or download a binary ("nightly") here.

Best Answer

Building VLC

If you have to build vlc yourself, make sure you have

--enable-sout
--enable-chromecast

Using VLC

Thus far this feature is not available under the GUI, however you can stream to Chromecast like this,

$ vlc --sout="#chromecast{ip=ip_address}" ./video.mp4

You can watch the video at the same time with

$ vlc --sout="#duplicate{dst=display,#chromecast{ip=ip_address}}" ./video.mp4

To make matters even better, you can actually add a delay on the video so it better syncs with the audio (sets the delay to 3100ms).

$ vlc --sout="#duplicate{dst=display{delay=3100},#chromecast{ip=ip_address}}" ./video.mp4

You can find the list of options support to chromecast here, they currently include

ip
port
http-port
mux
mime
video

Related Solutions

Stream Video using Netcat and VLC

I had been looking for such a solution this weekend. Since i found one i thought to share it for future researchers.

PC 1 = Server. The PC in my lan having my movie stored

$ netcat -l -p 8111 <mymovie.mp4      # -p 8111 :port 8111. Can be any port
#OR 
$ cat mymovie.mp4 |netcat -l -p 8111  # -l : listening mode

PC 2 = Client. The PC connected to my TV

$ netcat 192.168.1.116 8111 |vlc -         # Change IP accordingly to find PC1
#OR 
$ cat </dev/tcp/192.168.1.116/8111 |vlc -  # in Bash

Instead of vlc you can use mpv or any other video player as soon as read from standard input is supported.

Next Weekend Task:
Serve mymovie.mp4 to client alongside with subtitles srt file

Ubuntu – How to play a G2M4 encoded .wmv file (Ubuntu)

ffmpeg supports decoding of the G2M4 format. Why not try encoding your file to another format such as mpeg-4? Maybe:

ffmpeg -i input.wmv -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -c:a ac3 -q:a 100 output.mp4

like explained in this Q&A. I have converted the g2m4.wmv sample file here successfully. Make sure you have a recent version of ffmpeg(2.2.4 in my case). You can always try a precompiled version so you don't need to compile anything nor modify your package sources. Depending on the options chosen for encoding, this may require extra packages such as libavcodec-extra-53. In that respect you should keep track of the default packages available for your version of the distribution. You can see that vlc 2.1.4 is in 14.04 only and that both 13.04 and 13.10 have version 2.0.8.

You should note that Ubuntu's release model is not that of a rolling release so you shouldn't expect cutting edge software with older versions. Looking up the aforementioned website will let you know in advance what to expect. Otherwise as others have explained you can also resort to compiling VLC or adding a repository to use a more recent version(2.1.4 plays the G2M4 sample on my system).

Finally, you could try avconv(many examples provided) from the libav-tools package which is maybe favored by Ubuntu. It works in a very similar fashion to ffmpeg so I would try with the same options and debug from there. If you have one file it makes no sense to reinstall a distribution to try to play it.