Extracast

I’ve begun work on a desktop Chromecast media player. I have tons of old shows and movies collecting dust on hard drives that I really want to be able to play on my Chromecast. As most folks know, Chrome let’s you cast local video files by simply opening them with Chrome, and casting that tab. But this only works with video files that Chrome can play like MP4 and WebM files.

However, many of my old videos are in older formats (AVI, DivX, MPEG, etc), which are not natively playable, thus not “castable” through Chrome. There are a couple tools out there that claim to solve this problem. One of them is Videostream for Chromecast. It seems to work well for quickly playing videos on-the-fly, and supports subtitles. But the interface is a bit clumsy, and the media library is ephemeral (you have to load your videos or playlists each time).

As we all know, organization will set you free! So, I wanted to design something that was a bit more like a media center. Something where I can build a full media library and organize my video files by series or feature.

Stay tuned for a for feature set and a beta release!