castnow

castnow is a command-line utility that can be used to play back media files on your Chromecast device. It supports playback of local video files, videos on the web and torrents. You can also re-attach a running playback session (this sentence should belong somewhere else).

interested in being a castnow maintainer?

I currently don't have that much time to maintain this project and have also lost some interest (to be honest). Main reason is that we have had a new TV for a few months that supports casting directly to it using DLNA (you may wanna checkout dlnacast). Feel free to contact me ( simon@sope.io ) if you want to be added as a maintainer to castnow.

usage

// start playback of a local video file
castnow ./myvideo.mp4

// start playback of video and mp3 files in the local directory
castnow ./mydirectory/

// playback 3 videos after each other
castnow video1.mp4 video2.mp4 video3.mp4

// start playback of an mp4 file over the web
castnow http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/gtv-videos-bucket/ED_1280.mp4

// start playback of a video over torrent
castnow <url-to-torrent-file OR magnet>

// start playback of a video over torrent with local subtitles
castnow <url-to-torrent-file OR magnet> --subtitles </local/path/to/subtitles.srt>

// transcode some other video format to mp4 while playback (requires ffmpeg)
castnow ./myvideo.avi --tomp4

// re-attach to a currently running playback session
castnow

options

• --tomp4 Transcode a video file to mp4 during playback. This option requires ffmpeg to be installed on your computer. The play / pause controls are currently not supported in transcode mode.

• --device "my chromecast" If you have more than one Chromecast on your network, use the --device option to specify the device on which you want to start casting. Otherwise, castnow will just use the first device it finds in the network.

• --address 192.168.1.4 The IP address or hostname of your chromecast. This will skip the MDNS scan.

• --subtitles <path/URL> This can be a path or URL to a vtt or srt file that contains subtitles.

• --subtitle-scale 1.5 Scaling factor for the size of the subtitle font. Default is 1.0.

• --subtitle-color #FFFFFFFF Foreground RGBA color of the subtitle font.

• --myip 192.168.1.8 Your main IP address (useful if you have multiple network adapters)

• --quiet Hide the player timeline.

• --peerflix-<option> <argument> Pass options to peerflix.

• --ffmpeg-<option> <argument> Pass options to ffmpeg.

• --type <type> Explicity set the mime-type of the first item in the playlist (e.g. 'video/mp4').

• --seek <hh:mm:ss> Seek to the specified time on start using the format hh:mm:ss or mm:ss.

• --bypass-srt-encoding Disable automatic UTF-8 encoding of SRT subtitles.

• --loop Play the list of files over and over in a loop, forever.

• --help Display help message.

player controls

space   // toggle between play and pause
m       // toggle mute
up      // volume up
down    // volume down
left    // seek backward (keep pressed / multiple press for faster seek)
right   // seek forward (keep pressed / multiple press for faster seek)
n       // next item in the playlist (only supported in launch-mode)
s       // stop playback
q       // quit

YouTube support

We had to drop direct YouTube support for now since google changed the chromecast YouTube API. However, there is a nice workaround in combination with the tool youtube-dl:

youtube-dl -o - https://youtu.be/BaW_jenozKc | castnow --quiet -

Thanks to trulex for pointing that out.

reporting bugs/issues

Please include the debug output in your issues. You can enable the debug messages by setting the DEBUG environment variable before running the castnow command like this: DEBUG=castnow* castnow ./myvideo.mp4. Some problems have already been addressed in our wiki https://github.com/xat/castnow/wiki.

installation

npm install castnow -g

contributors

• tooryx
• przemyslawpluta

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Simon Kusterer

Licensed under the MIT license.