Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by delive 4482 days ago
Question - is it possible to have Chromecast play urls directly to flash files? For example youtube gives out embedded links such as "www.youtube.com/embed/26UvdxUII-0". I realize that isn't a .swf file url, but it works in my browser. Since youtube already has an app that plays to chromecast.. I'm more thinking of random flash players on websites.
1 comments

No, chromecast cannot play flash videos. But you can extract the URL of the videos from common swf based players like JWPlayer using a tool like youtube-dl [1] and then use that URL to playback the content in chromecast. This will probably make a good chrome extension.

[1] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/

thanks, please can someone give more basic instructions on how to do this. I for e.g. love a cricket streaming site (flash based www.crictime.com). How do I extract the video url to play on chromecast?

thanks much.

the particular example that you want seems to use eplayer. it seems like it's a livestream and uses some proprietary protocol and is not as simple as fetching data from a URL and playing it back. So it's unlikely that you'll be able to watch this particular site for chromecast unless they (either crictime or eplayer) decide to publish an app that implements their proprietary protocol for chromecast.
thx for your quick reply. obviously a disappointment!. Please can you also tell how could i use the youtube-Dl link you gave away to extract url from flash based sites? Also is there a way to play live videos from youtube in chromecast. Currently, live streams in youtube appear to be unsupported?

thanks again!