I’m in the process of degoogling and I’m stuck trying to find a reasonable alternative to Chromecast. It would be great if I could stream music/video from my phone to my TV from apps like RiMusic, Tidal, and NewPipe. Are there any good solutions? Even better if friends and family can use it with minimal additional setup.
Chromecast is fraud. Use DLNA
We’d love to but there are almost zero Android apps that suport DLNA. You can use DLNA for your Jellyfin but if you want to cast from the app of any large streaming service it wants Chromecast (or Apple TV, which is another quagmire).
Use Kore on phone and Kodi on TV
Does Kore make the Netflix app stream to Kodi?
Even if it does, I can’t exactly make everybody who comes by install an app to be able to stream to my TV. Everybody (who’s on Wifi) can stream to the Chromecast.
Netflix is fraud too. Use local files
How so? It seems like chromecast does exactly what it says it does, even if it’s a suboptimal solution for not being FOSS.
What is does is stupid. You always want to stream the media, not mirror your screen!
I wonder if you’ve ever used a Chromecast based on this criticism.
For a standard Chromecast, you open the app on your phone, then press the cast button, then the device you want to cast to, and the the device begins to stream the media independently of your device. You can shut off the device you used to start casting and it doesn’t matter because Chromecast is pulling the data on its own.
On some websites such as YouTube on PC, you also have a cast button and you can press it, select the device and it’ll start playing. you can get this button to work on all kinds of sites, and a lot of open source software supports it to a degree such as VLC, Peertube (through a plugin), and Jellyfin.
Using google chrome you can cast your current webpage or your desktop, but that’s not the standard use of Chromecast.
It takes some finagling, but you can cast from Jellyfin to a standard Chromecast right from your phone.
The latest version out is Chromecast with Android TV, which is really nice (for now). It’s running a version of android and has the play store, so you can set up the Jellyfin android TV app, and stream from your home server without requiring a domain name or https like you do to stream properly on straight Chromecast.
The big issue with Chromecast in my view is that it’s a Google product which means 3 things:
- it’s proprietary, which has many risks coming from that nature and a crappy largely hidden API
- it can be shut down any moment if they desire (see google graveyard), and being an always-on device it’s possible they just brick it on the way out
- it will suck up as much data as they can from you to try to sell you more crap
