Hurl

No longer being actively worked on, as there are a plethora of Chromecast apps for streaming local content

About

Hurl is a simple and opinionated web-based media server for playing MP4 media files on a Google Chromecast.

Hurl is basically a web application that uses the chromecast javascript sender API to

• connect/disconnect to/from a Google chromecast
• play, pause and stop mp4 media files

I based this off of the CastVideos-chrome example app, so full credit to: https://github.com/googlecast/CastVideos-chrome

I also am using Trakt for serving up images, thumbnails, descriptions, etc. Trakt is awesome you should check it out http://trakt.tv.

Prerequisites

• A Chromecast
• Google Chrome browser
• Ruby 2.0.0+
• Rails 4.0.0
• Nginx
• A Trakt account (you will get an API Key that we will use to fetch images, descriptions, etc.)
• Media (i.e. your MP4 files)

Convention

Remember when I said Hurl was opinionated? Well the reason is to provide some reasonable structure and naming conventions so Hurl can fetch information about media from Trakt.

Hurl reads information from a root directory that contains two different subdirectories for Movies and TV:

i.e.

<SOME_DIR>/
  |-- Movies
  |-- TV

Within each directory you may have subdirectories, etc.

For example:

<SOME_DIR>/
  |-- Movies
      |-- Fight Club/
          |-- Fight.Club.mp4
      |-- The Amazing Spiderman/
          |-- The.Amazing.Spiderman.2012.mp4
  |-- TV
      |-- Breaking Bad
          |-- Breaking.Bad.S01E02.mp4

Last note on "convention", since media information is fetched from Trakt it is advised to name movies, shows or episodes using the convention below so it will provide the best information and provide better matches from Trakt.tv.

Movie names examples:

• Fight Club.mp4
• Fight.Club.mp4

or also can include the year to get better matches

• Fight.Club.1999.mp4
• The.Amazing.Spiderman.2012.mp4

TV Shows / Episodes examples:

• Breaking Bad S01E02.mp4
• Breaking.Bad.S01E02.mp4

Basically you dont want a bunch of extra crap in the file names. Directory names don't matter much, its mainly the file names which are used to derive information and fetch data from Trakt.tv.

Setup

First step: clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/markstgodard/hurl.git
cd hurl

HTTP Server

Secondly we want to configure and run a simple HTTP server to serve up our MP4 files (NGINX is better for serving video than a Rails server)

We will use an NGINX proxy to Rails server and will bypass all requests to /media to serve up your video files

Install, configure and run NGINX

Change and in example config below.

Example Nginx configuration (scripts/nginx/nginx.conf)

worker_processes  1;


events {
    worker_connections  1024;
    }

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    server {
      listen       80;
      server_name  localhost;

      access_log <SOME DIR>/hurl/log/access.log;
      error_log <SOME DIR>/hurl/log/error.log;

      location /media/ {
          root <ROOT DIR OF YOUR MEDIA FILES>;
          autoindex on;
        }

      location / {
          proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
        }
    }
}

Hurl web application

Now we want to run the web application that serves up media and provides a minimal interface to connect to Chromecast and play media files.

Edit hurl/config/hurlconfig.yml to set the ip of the node http server (previous step) and the network accessible share directory locations for "Movies" and "TV" shows and your Trakt Api Key (you'll need to create an account on http://trakt.tv and get an API key, its quick and painless)

media_http_server: http://<ip address of http server>/media
movies_directory: /Volumes/Data/media/Movies
tv_directory: /Volumes/Data/media/TV
trakt_api_key: <Trakt API Key>

NOTE: You may also set your Trakt API KEY using an ENV variable

export TRAKT_API_KEY=<your trakt api key>

Run the web application

> cd hurl
> bundle install
> rails server

Usage

Fire up Chrome and goto http://localhost:3000 or http://localhost

There should be a grid of media thumbnails, click one and go to the top of the screen to use the media player (connect to Chromecast, play/pause, etc.)

Notes

All media information is saved in Active Record entities so information about movies, tv shows, etc is not fetched from Trakt.tv every time.

However if you want to "force" refresh information you can simply do a Media.delete_all, for example:

> cd hurl
> rails console
Loading development environment (Rails 4.0.0)
2.0.0-p247 :001 > Media.delete_all
SQL (2.6ms)  DELETE FROM "media"
=> 28

TODOs

• Have link to group Movies vs. Shows (i.e. a link maybe so filter based on Movies or TV Shows etc)
• Sorting (i.e. sort by name or file date)
• support look up of episode info by naming convention ("Name.of.Show.yyyy.mm.dd.mp4")
• improve media lookup, less hacky / dependent on naming conventions
• update tests to use VCR instead of hitting Trakt

License

I based the chromecast / javascript off of the Google CastVideo-chrome sample application: https://github.com/googlecast/CastVideos-chrome which is under the Apache 2.0 License. This project is also under the Apache 2.0 license.