Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by akvadrako 1838 days ago
You say this has nothing to do with Chromecast and then describe the #1 use-case for casting, to play movies that sit on your device (phone, laptop) on your TV.

Jellyfin, based on their website, looks like just another media server.
2 comments
xenomachina 1838 days ago
> the #1 use-case for casting, to play movies that sit on your device (phone, laptop) on your TV

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.

link
stuaxo 1837 days ago
I'm guessing this won't work for the "cast" button from my computer or from apps or websites on my phone like Youtube, Vimeo or All Four (the uk channel 4 app).

I like what they've done, but Google has really locked this down unfortunately.

link
akvadrako 1838 days ago
Well NymphCast does that too. The 2nd feature mentioned in their README:

> Streaming online content by passing a URL to the server.

link
ghostly_s 1837 days ago
I suspect what they mean is digging around in the source of a webpage to find the content url, hoping it's not obfuscated or DRM'd, and passing that; not "passing a URL" in the sense of streaming arbitrary web pages as Chromecast is able to do.
link
caslon 1837 days ago
Why wouldn't it be able to do both? youtube-dl has solved that exact use-case for years.
link
stormbrew 1837 days ago
The #1 use case for 'casting' with a chromecast in my house is absolutely to stream from online services to my tv or monitor while controlling it from a device that would melt or run down its battery if it tried to act as a go-between for the data, or had to potentially re-encode data from its storage to what the tv can support.

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.

link
trav4225 1836 days ago
> Sadly google seems to hate the chromecast and even their own software gets worse at casting to it every year.

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.

link