CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-cast
DRayX
DRayX

Reputation: 1063

Send content to chromecast from native application

Is it possible to send video to the chromecast device from a native application? It would be nice to share any window on a system instead of only chrome tabs. Also, is there any documentation of the communication used by chrome to communicate with the chromecast? It is my understanding that the chromecast essentially loads content from an embedded chrome instance, but there appears to be more direct ways of communicating with the device since it is able to stream content from a chrome tab using the extension.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 11053

Answers (2)

Phil Bozak
Phil Bozak

Reputation: 2822

From how I understand the Chromecast architecture:

You can display any URL you want on the TV (you have to whitelist your app and register the URL first). It must be a URL. This can include HTML, JS, CSS, etc. Anything that is already on the internet.

To receive data from a device (say, the URL of a video to load), you must implement logic to interpret messages from channels. These messages are encoded as JSON, which makes it difficult to send videos or pictures (binary data). It is obviously easiest to upload things like this to some website, and have the receiver display them.

People have asked, "well, then how does the tab/screen sharing work?" The JSON encoding is just what Google provides in their SDK. In their own source, they don't have this restriction.

Update: It turns out you can actually stream local videos to your TV by just opening the local file in Chrome, and then casting that to your TV.

Upvotes: 1

Dov D.
Dov D.

Reputation: 530

You need to whitelist your receiver device if you are developing a receiver application. That would be a Chome app that runs on the receiver's Chrome instance.

You need to whitelist a sender url if you are developing a Chrome app that will cast it's contents.

Video casting works by sending a url to the receiver device, which the device will load directly.

Tab casting works by encoding the tab contents using WebM/Opus (in the Chrome cast extension) and streaming that to the receiver device. (This is limited to 720p, see this question)

Chrome apps can only use Video casting.

The chrome cast extension is going to be the only way to stream directly to the device.

So the answer to your question is no, you cannot stream video directly to the device. The receiver must load the video from the url you provide.

There is some speculation whether the receiver can be provided with a local url or if it must already be available on the internet. This has yet to be clarified.

Upvotes: 1

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