Cast to Chromecast

[jaruba]

This will be largely based on the current work from Powder Player while using the internal transcoding server of Powder Web.

[jaruba]

This should be a priority, as it would work in the browser and thus makes sense to be on a server application.

[jaruba]

To note: It is already possible to cast a web page to Chromecast by right clicking the video (in the Chrome browser) and pressing the "Cast" option, so this is already theoretically support. The difference is between casting a web page and casting a video. Casting the video (or a web player) has some perks that are worthwhile though, so I'm still interested in attempting this.

[Tekka90]

I guess you already know but just to make sure, casting from chrome means that on your "desktop/laptop" you have a process running, reencoding the content of the tab and sending it to your chromcast [compatible device]. As you said it can bring some issue with audio sync, quality, frame rate....
While if you do a proper Chromecast feature, you basically have a direct link between ffmpeg on the server and the Chromecast compatible device. You can shut down your desktop/laptop... but also it means you can have it running from non Chrome browser (say iPad, iPhone, or anyone who prefers Firefox to Chrome :) )

[jaruba]

Well yes, I do know that. But there is a greater complexity here that is not obvious. Because we're doing on-the-fly transcoding (as opposed to pre-transcoding) on the server-side, we can't know the entire length of the transcoded video. This means that the videos that we play in the browser are not normally seekable, but the web player fixes this need with it's own logic.

This also means that if we cast the video to Chromecast it will also not be seekable, the workaround for this is to cast a web page with a web player that fixes it for Chromecast too. In this case it won't need to re-transcode the web page a second time though, because Chromecast literally has a built-in Chrome browser too, but it will be harder to implement.

As for support in more browsers then just Chrome, as far as I have researched, the Google Cast SDK has APIs only for: Chrome, Android and iOS. This makes me think that only Chrome browsers and phone apps can use this feature for now.