catt

Cast All The Things

Cast All The Things allows you to send videos from many, many online sources (YouTube, Vimeo, and a few hundred others) to your Chromecast. It also allows you to cast local files or render websites.

Installation

You can install Cast All The Things with pipx:

pipx install catt

Or with pip, but that's not as good:

pip3 install catt

catt is only compatible with Python 3. If you need a Python 2-compatible version, please install 0.5.6, the last py2-compatible release.

Usage

To use Cast All The Things, just specify a URL:

catt cast "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"

catt supports any service that yt-dlp supports, which includes most online video hosting services.

catt can also cast local files (if they're in a format the Chromecast supports natively):

catt cast ./myvideo.mp4

You can also control your Chromecast through catt commands, for example with catt pause. Try running catt --help to see the full list of commands.

If you have subtitles and the name is similar to the name of the local file, catt will add them automatically. You can, of course, specify any other subtitle if you want. Although Chromecast only supports WEBVTT, TTML and Line 21 subtitles, catt conveniently converts SRTs to WEBVTT for you on the fly. Here is how to use it:

catt cast -s ./mysubtitle.srt /myvideo.mp4

catt can also tell your Chromecast to display any website:

catt cast_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling

Please note that the Chromecast has a slow CPU but a reasonably recent version of Google Chrome. The display resolution is 1280x720.

If you want to pass yt-dlp options to catt through the [-y]{.title-ref} command-line flag, you need to use yt-dlp's internal option name, rather than its command-line name.

If you notice that catt stops working with video sites (YouTube, Vimeo, etc), just upgrade yt-dlp with [pip install -U yt-dlp]{.title-ref} and that will probably fix it. This is because sites keep changing and yt-dlp is updated very regularly to keep them all working.

You can also run catt in Docker, if you prefer:

docker run --net=host --rm -it python:3.7 /bin/bash -c "pip install catt; catt cast 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ'"

Configuration file

CATT can utilize a config-file stored at ~/.config/catt/catt.cfg (%APPDATA%\catt\catt.cfg on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/catt/catt.cfg on macOS).

The format is as following:

[options]
device = chromecast_one

[aliases]
one = chromecast_one
two = chromecast_two

In the [options] section, device denotes the default device that will be selected, when you have not selected a device via the cli.

You can write your choice of default device to catt.cfg by doing:

catt -d <name_of_chromecast> set_default

In the [aliases] section, you can specify aliases for the names of your chromecasts. You can then select a device just by doing:

catt -d <alias> <command>

You can write an alias name for a device to catt.cfg by doing:

catt -d <name_of_chromecast> set_alias <alias>

Firewall

For the casting of local files to work you need to allow in the port range 45000-47000 over tcp.

Contributing

If you want to contribute a feature to catt, please open an issue (or comment on an existing one) first, to make sure it's something that the maintainers are interested in. Afterwards, just clone the repository and hack away!

To run catt in development, you can use the following command:

python -m catt.cli --help

Before committing, please make sure you install pre-commit and install its hooks:

pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

That's all, now you can commit and the hooks will run. Black (which is used to format the code) requires Python 3.6 to run, but please make the effort, as our CI will yell at you if the code is not formatted, and nobody wants that.

Thanks!

Info

• Free software: BSD license

Features

• Casts videos to Chromecast
• From many, many online sources
• Casts local files (videos, photos and music)
• Casts any website to Chromecast

Thanks

Catt would not be possible without these great projects:

• pychromecast - Library for Python 3 to communicate with the Google Chromecast
• yt-dlp - Command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and other video sites
• casttube - YouTube Chromecast API