NymphCast – Open-source Chromecast Alternative(github.com) |
NymphCast – Open-source Chromecast Alternative(github.com) |
This has nothing to do with Chromecast, nor does it have anything to do with Google Cast, nor will it let or help you "Cast" anything like YouTube to your Cast capable devices.
What this is, is an (early) software implementation to stream media from a control device (your phone etc) to an SBC or other machine running the server code, and connected to a TV or monitor. It appears that the media must be resident on the controller and not the server.
It looks like they're aiming for multiple targets with "good" synchronisation, whatever that means.
Looks like a nice toy project for someone but there seem to be far more mature tools out there, at least for multi-room audio.
For video, if you don't need sync, Jellyfin (libre Emby fork) is quite capable.
Jellyfin, based on their website, looks like just another media server.
Is it really, though? I've used "casting" many times, and it was always to cast something that was "on the cloud", never something that was on my phone, to my TV. For example, it's a lot easier to find a specific YouTube video with my phone than with my TV remote.
That's still the niche that chromecast fills better than anything else at a price point that means you can buy one for every tv and monitor in your house for the cost of a more fully featured device with storage on one or two tvs.
Sadly google seems to hate the chromecast and even their own software gets worse at casting to it every year.
And this title is misleading.
Any serious product using it which depends somewhat on performance should probably integrate V8 or something similar instead. The Angelscript language is very similar to Javascript etc. but so niche that you'll keep having to look stuff up.
That's a huge amount of effort between, love it!
Monitor-over-network would be great too, but not a requirement; I'm aware that solutions exist, but so far everything I've tried has been painfully clunky.
Let me give an example. I keep all my media in a home NAS (Nas4Free plus RAID etc.) as simple files (mpeg4 etc.). My home TV is connected to a RPi running Kodi that accesses the file list through SMB/NFS shares, as every other computer in the house. If I want to watch a movie, I use Kodi to navigate the file list until I find the relevant file and play it. There are no downsides since it's a one click solution, and the pretty good CEC support by Kodi and the RPi makes it a breeze (one single remote for both the TV and Kodi) but this way the file is being transcoded by the player (the RPi) and not by the streming hardware, which would be an often less powerful platform like a NAS. This also means the streamed content travels as compressed packets through the network, in fact loading it a lot less than for example it would happen when streaming it after transcoding. As a result, I could have like 10 machines watching each one its own Full HD movie on a home wired network, which would be unthinkable if the poor NAS had to transcode all of them on the fly, not to mention the much heavier network load.
So the question is: what's the point in streaming in home environments rather than navigating file shares?
No Bluetooth nonsense with notification sounds.
Better sorting via software like Plex or something else, then casting that stream to something else.
Casting doesn't mean transcoding either.
Casting to a group of devices that stays in sync.
My Chromecast Audios will be online for a very long time.
According to one of its creators, the device can be ordered partially pre-assembled for $10 and requires additional parts worth another $10 to be soldered on by yourself.
Does this allow me to turn a SBC into a Chromecast? Meaning, do I install this on a SBC, or any Linux machine, and magically I can cast YouTube to it from my phone?
The README could use a quick FAQ of what this repo can and cannot do as it relates to the Chromecast/Google Cast ecosystem since they’re using that brand name in the description.
It turns it into a device that can receive control and streams from another device using software specific to this implementation.
To be more specific, I will need to "onboard" a fresh chromecast into my network with Google Home before i can use this?
That's literally the first line in the repo description.
Yeah, I've always been amazed at how unreliable and broken the Chromecast software seems to be (for me, at least). I feel like Google really missed an opportunity here.
If this hadn't been the case, I personally would have purchased more of them and, importantly, recommended them to many people. But, after a couple tries (gen. 1 and gen. 2), I gave up.
https://blog.oakbits.com/google-cast-protocol-receiver-authe...
An alternative Chromecast receiver needs cooperation from the sender one way or another.
I like what they've done, but Google has really locked this down unfortunately.
> Streaming online content by passing a URL to the server.
Edit: although maybe some apps still support DIAL and that might be an option.
For example you can open a video in a player (like VLC) and choose "Render -> to Chromecast".