Chromecast is becoming the most used device to transmit to our TV what is playing on our computer, mobile or even in the browser. Linux users do not have a native functionality that allows us to send audio and video from Linux to Chromecast , so we must opt for applications such as mkchromecast , which allows us to easily transmit the content we want to display on our TV through this device.
What is the Chromecast?
It is an HDMI device similar to a USB drive that connects to the TV in order to capture the signal from the multimedia devices that are connected in the Wi-Fi network. With this tool we can visualize the multimedia contents that are sent from our computers, mobile phones and even the web browser.
What is mkchromecast?
It is an open source tool, written in Python and that uses node.js, ffmpegor avconvto send audio and video from Linux to Chromecast.
mkchromecast sends multimedia to our Chromecast without losing audio and video quality, it also supports multiple transmissions, high-quality 24-bit / 96kHz audio resolution, direct transmission from YouTube, among other features found in modern Chromecast models .
The tool is equipped with an excellent user panel, which is displayed in our inbox. In the same way, the installation of mkchromecast is simple in almost all Linux distros.
How to install and use mkchromecast?
In any Linux distro we can install mkchromecast directly from its source code hosted on Github, for this we must perform the following steps:
- Clone the official repository of the tool, or in its absence download the stable version of the application from here .
$ git clone https://github.com/muammar/mkchromecast.git
- We go to the newly cloned folder and proceed to execute pip install with the file requirements.txtthat contains all the necessary dependencies for the tool to work properly (in some cases the tool must be executed with sudo):
$ cd mkchromecast/
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
Users of Debia, Ubuntu and derivatives can install the tool directly from the official repositories, you only have to execute the following command from the console:
sudo apt-get install mkchromecast
For their part, Arch Linux users and derivatives can use the package available in the AUR repository
yaourt -S mkchromecast-git
We can visualize in detail the behavior and use of this application in the following gif distributed by the developer team. In addition we can see the official tutorials of use from here .
Stream from YouTube to Chromecast
Particularly something that I like about this application is that we can transmit a YouTube video directly from the console to our chromecast, for this we must execute the following command:
python mkchromecast.py -y https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=NVvAJhZVBT
Undoubtedly a tool that will allow us to send our multimedia from Linux to Chromecast in an easy, fast and without losing quality..
