chromecastplay is a modern, easy-to-use, full-featured yet simple command line application for streaming video to a ChromeCast.

• Embedded webserver for streaming local files to the ChromeCast.
• Supports streaming incomplete files. Useful for watching a video still being download by Torrent, MEGAsync or other means.
• Optional real-time video transcoding when you need to play a video codec not supported by ChromeCast.
• Supports subtitles supplied by an external file (e.g. SRT format) or embedded in a video file (e.g. MKV format). Automatically converts several subtitle formats to the WebVTT format supported by ChromeCast.
• Allows the user to control video playback (seek, volume, pause and resume).

You need Python3 and pip:

sudo apt install python3-minimal
wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
sudo -H python3 get-pip.py

You also need to install some required Python packages:

sudo -H python3 -m pip install -r pip-requirements.txt

In order to use the subtitles and video transcoding features, you need to install FFmpeg:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

./chromecastplay.py -v videofile.mp4

Note: If the video file was encoded with a codec not supported by ChromeCast, playback will abort before starting without any further notice. In this case, try the -t option presented below.

./chromecastplay.py -t -v videofile.mkv

Note: When real-time transcoding is enabled, the video stream will be unseekable.

./chromecastplay.py -v videofile.mkv

./chromecastplay.py -v videofile.mp4 -s subtitles.srt

./chromecastplay.py -c -v videofile.mkv

Note: When playing an incomplete file, the video stream will be unseekable.

Take a look at the full help message to learn about other command line options:

./chromecastplay.py -h

The playback control feature was based on code from the chromecastplayer project by Stefano Rivera.