How to Cast Audio and Video from Linux to Chromecast

chromecast It is becoming the most used device to transmit to our TV what is being reproduced on our computer, mobile or even in the browser. Linux users do not have a native functionality that allows us cast Linux audio and video to Chromecast, so we must opt ​​for applications like mkchromecast, which allows us to easily transmit the content that we want to view on our television using this device.

What is the Chromecast?

It is an HDMI device similar to a USB drive that is connected 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 view the multimedia content that is sent from our computers, mobile phones and even the web browser.

What is mkchromecast?

It is an open source tool, written in Python and what do you use  node.js, ffmpego avconv to get the audio and video from Linux to Chromecast.

mkchromecast send multimedia to our Chromecast without losing audio and video quality, it is also compatible with multiple streams, high-quality audio resolution 24-bit / 96kHz, direct streaming from YouTube, among other features present in modern Chromecast models.

The tool is equipped with an excellent usage panel, which is displayed in our inbox. Similarly, the installation of mkchromecast it's straightforward on 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, failing that, 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.txt which contains all the necessary dependencies for the tool to work properly (in some cases the tool must be run with sudo):

$ cd mkchromecast/
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Debia, Ubuntu and derivative users can install the tool directly from the official repositories, just run 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 the behavior and use of this application in detail in the following gif distributed by the development team. We can also see the official usage tutorials from here..

Cast from Youtube to Chromecast

Particularly something that I like about this application is that we can directly transmit a YouTube video 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

Without a doubt, a tool that will allow us to send our multimedia from Linux to Chromecast in an easy, fast way and without losing quality.