Ubuntu Cast: thoughts on streaming to the big screen

Asked by Pimm "de Chinchilla" Hogeling

Hi everyone,

This is an idea for an Ubuntu app. Please guide me if there is a better place to post this, as I am not familiar with this maze.

At home, I stream videos from my Ubuntu-powered notebook to my Chromecast-powered TV. My notebook hosts the videos. The Chromecast downloads the videos through the local network and decodes them. My phone is the remote. It works well. I feel perhaps other Ubuntu users would enjoy being able to copy my setup.

The challenge: taking videos ‒ perhaps DVD rips or home videos of dogs ‒ from an Ubuntu desktop or notebook and showing them on the biggest screen in the house.

The old-fashioned way connects the two devices with an HDMI cable. An increasingly popular alternative is to open the video in Google Chrome and casting the entire tab.

The setup I have in my home has two (potential) advantages over casting a Chrome tab:
- From what I understand, casting a Chrome tab actually decodes and simultaneously encodes any video within Chrome. This unnecessarily puts stress on the desktop/notebook, and any hiccups on that side would cause frame drops on the TV. My setup requires next to no effort from the desktop/notebook, and allows the Chromecast to load parts of the content in advance as it would with a YouTube video. I think it therefore has a higher chance of uninterrupted playback.
- My setup allows a user to pause and resume, seek within the video, and jump to another video from their phone. The experience is similar to that of casting content from YouTube, Crunchyroll, or the NPO app.

An Ubuntu app could make this setup easy to achieve. And the technology is here. (In fact, GNU+Linux is great at being a server.)

A visual representation of my vision can be found here: http://ilumbo.org/ubuntu-cast/mockup/01.png

In the Ubuntu app running on the desktop/notebook, a user would select videos to make available for casting. The app would then spin up a file server on some port.

The user would then open up an app on their phone or tablet. It would somehow have to connect to the file server on the desktop/notebook. Perhaps that machine knows its own IP address and shows a QR code for the handheld (phone/tablet) to scan. Network Service Discovery would be even easier.

Once the app on the handheld is connected, it shows a list of the available videos. The app can cast just like YouTube and Crunchyroll can. Once connected to a Chromecast or "Chromecast built-in" TV, the phone serves merely as a remote.

Limitations:
- The desktop/notebook with the videos, the handheld, and the Chromecast have to be on the same network.
- Although the handheld is no longer strictly needed once there's content on the TV, the desktop/notebook has to stay awake.

An alternative setup takes out the handheld and sends instructions directly from the Ubuntu desktop/notebook to the Chromecast.

I would like to ask you: how useful do you think such an app would be? Is there any software that you know of which already does this, or part of this? I've found "Plex" (https://www.plex.tv/) and "Videostream for Google Chromecast" (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videostream-for-google-ch/cnciopoikihiagdjbjpnocolokfelagl), and I've read that VLC has Chromecast support as well.

If such an app is deemed useful and fit for Ubuntu, I would like to work on it. Relevant background: I have experience building Android apps as well as Google Cast receivers (the things that run inside the Chromecast), but not so much with building Ubuntu apps.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said :
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