Cast Media to Chromecast using Castnow

What is Castnow?

You know how to cast media from your phone or tablet to your Chromecast. But did you know you can also cast any audio/video file on the internet using a direct link to your Chromecast? Castnow is a command-line tool you can use to cast media from your computer to your Chromecast or any cast-enabled device without needing any additional software or hardware.

Castnow supports a wide range of media formats, including MP4, AVI, MKV, and more. You can find the project on GitHub. The project is not being actively maintained so some of the claims made in the readme file are no longer valid, but it still works for the most part, this tutorial will show you how to use it for what works.

Installation

Before using Castnow, you need to install it on your computer. Castnow is a node.js package, so in order to use it you need to have node.js installed on your computer. If you don’t have it installed, you can download it from the official website. After you have installed node.js, you can install Castnow using the following command:

npm install -g castnow

Basic Usage

You can cast a video to your chromecast using a video url.

Unfortunately, castnow doesn’t detect the chromecast device automatically, so you need to specify the IP address of your device using the --address option. You can find the IP address of your device by going to the wifi settings in your chromecast settings. Assuming your chromecast IP address is 192.168.1.10, you can cast a video to your chromecast using the following command:

castnow --address 192.168.1.10 http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/gtv-videos-bucket/ED_1280.mp4

After starting the cast, you can use the following keys to control the playback:

space   // toggle between play and pause
m       // toggle mute
t       // toggle subtitles
up      // volume up
down    // volume down
left    // seek backward (keep pressed / multiple press for faster seek)
right   // seek forward (keep pressed / multiple press for faster seek)
s       // stop playback
q       // quit