Cast photos & videos stored on a NAS directly to Google Chromecast or Android TV.
This is like having a huge photo frame in the house - images are shown in random order by default. A good way to break your photo collection free.
- Synology NAS device (or any other server containing photos and running PHP)
- Google Chromecast dongle for your TV or Android TV device
- sender/ - Chromecast sender, use it to start and control the show from Google Chrome, Chromium, Brave or other derived browser. It looks like this, but you need to deploy your own.
- receiver/ - Chromecast receiver - will run on Chromecast dongle/Android TV, or use it stand-alone for in-browser slideshow.
- backend/ - PHP scripts for listing and serving the actual photos & videos from NAS, or any other php-enabled server.
config.php/js- each directory has a config file, where you can define paths of photos on your server and other options
Android TVs and Chromecast Ultra still cannot display any non-video content above FullHD 1080p. 2160p resolution is only used for compatible videos, any other elements of receiver are downscaled, including images.
In order to display images at full TV resolution, they are converted to 1-frame mp4 videos using ffmpeg, see photov.php.
Set mode: 'img' in receiver/config if you are fine with 1080p resolution or cannot use ffmpeg.
- Enable Web Station in DSM web interface
- Create PHP 7 or 8 profile in Script Language Settings
- Add your photos and videos and tmp directories to PHP open_basedir - otherwise they won't be accessible to PHP
e.g.
/volume1/web:/volume1/photo:/volume1/video:/var/services/tmp - Copy/clone this repository to the 'web' directory on your NAS
- Review
backend/config.phpand set correct paths of your photos and videos. - Create a file
php-access-token.txtin your photos_list_dir, specify there whatever password you will use for listing of your directories, or use an empty string inbackend/config.php. Sender will ask for it when used for the first time. - Open http://your-nas-ip/sender/ in your browser, start casting!
- Or open http://your-nas-ip/receiver/ to watch photos in the browser (Use Esc key to specify the directory to watch)
- Optionally, enable DynamicDNS/Quick Connect, and request Let's Encrypt https certificate to have your URL as https://your-nas.synology.me/
Note: backend PHP scripts can take advantage of rawfs running on the NAS making it possible to cast raw (e.g. Canon CR2) photos directly, without converting them to jpeg first. This is not needed if your photos are already in jpeg format.
Videos are streamed directly without transcoding, so your Chromecast must support their format. H264 works the best across devices. Newer TVs and Chromecast Ultra do support VP9 and HEVC/H265 as well.
There is also an Android sender app for controlling the casted photos instead of html sender.
If you own an older Synology with simple CPU that cannot resize/convert photos, set mode to 'img' in receiver/config.js.
E.g. on DS212j resizing a photo from Canon 5D mk2 takes about a minute with imagemagick, while Chromecast downloads 2.5Mb over local Wi-Fi and fits the same image to the screen in just a couple of seconds.
Note, in the Releases there is an ARMv5 binary of ffmpeg that supports H264 encoding. It's slow, but works.
Chromecast receivers need to be registered with Google to get an appId. I have already registered one that anyone can use, specified in sender config - it will load the receiver hosted on Github first, and then the sender will tell it to redirect to your own NAS (same origin that you use to access the sender).
If you want, you can also register your own Chromecast receiver app with Google pointing to http://your-nas-ip/receiver/ You will need to pay Google $5 for the privilege, but it will also be possible to register your Chromecast device for testing, enabling remote debugging/inspection and use of http (insecure) links.