The Unofficial Apple Events App for MacOS with Chromecast Support

lmedinas 9 years ago |

Did you reverse engineer the Chromecast protocol ? Or is it opensource now ?

insidegui 9 years ago | |

The Chromecast protocol specification (CASTV2) itself is sort of open. To implement it on macOS I did a little bit of reverse engineering and used a description of the protocol I found here: https://github.com/thibauts/node-castv2

alexbilbie 9 years ago | |

It's open source - https://developers.google.com/cast/

lmedinas 9 years ago | | |

But unfortunately is only available for "Android, Chrome or iOS app"

So this means other applications like Firefox, VLC etc... would have to reverse engineer the protocol.

lorenzhs 9 years ago | | |

VLC has Chromecast support in the development version, and has had it for over a year now. They had to reverse-engineer the protocol. I think the UI is a bit cludgey but it works.

Rexxar 9 years ago | | |

reverse engineering != porting to an other platform

edit: but is it really open source as said by previous comment or is it just an SDK ?

mcintyre1994 9 years ago | | |

It's closed source. This project uses an open source implementation he wrote himself: https://github.com/insidegui/ChromeCastCore

> This framework implements the Google Cast APIs so they can be used in macOS apps. Google provides an official SDK but it is only for iOS and closed source.

fzn 9 years ago |

There might be a naming clash here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_event

insidegui 9 years ago | |

Hahahahaha true!

soapdog 9 years ago | | |

Yes, I went to the link quite happy because I thought it was related to AppleEvents and maybe Apple Scripts. Your app is definitely cool, congratulations on your work but the name got me fooled.

PS: Maybe the HN people haven't used MacOS 9 and AppleScript a lot and will not do the association I did.

sumitgt 9 years ago |

This is nice. Though, I plan on going through the source code later, can you give a short gist of how it works?

insidegui 9 years ago | |

I don't know which part you're most interested in, but in a nutshell: the events are fetched from the same API as the Apple TV Events app (found that using a proxy), the Chromecast streaming uses Bonjour to find Chromecast devices on the network and the CASTV2 protocol over TCP to send commands to them.

sanjeetsuhag 9 years ago | |

How what works ? Are you asking about the fetching of the streams or the Chromecast support ?

oceanghost 9 years ago |

I've done a lot of cast hacking for my employer-- very interested in this :)

alexpersian 9 years ago |

Fantastic! Thanks for the continued work Guilherme!