Cast To TV v11 GNOME Chromecast Extension Adds Remote Widget Playlist, GNOME Shell 3.34 Support

Cast to TV, a GNOME Shell extension to cast media (with optional transcoding) to Chromecast and other devices over the local network, was updated to version 11 yesterday. This release brings support for the latest GNOME 3.34, a file queue (playlist) for the remote widget, NVENC hardware acceleration support, and more.

Cast to TV is a GNOME Shell extension to cast videos, music and pictures to Chromecast or other devices over a local network. It supports video transcoding on the fly (for videos that can't directly play on the device), customizable subtitles, it can show a music visualizer while casting music, and much more. For controlling the device, the Gnome Shell extensions adds a new button on the top panel with playback controls.

The new Cast to TV v11 adds a file queue (playlist) to the remote widget. This new playlist supports reordering and removing items (drop them outside of the playlist) using drag'n'drop, and adding more items either from the Nautilus/Nemo context menu or from the regular extension menu. Note that newly added items must be of the same file type as the existing playlist items.

It's worth noting that the playlist automatically advances to the next item for audio and video files, but that's not currently possible for images (so you can't cast an automatic image slideshow right now; to advance to the next image you must click the Next button for now), but support for this will be added in a future release.

Other interesting changes in Cast to TV v11:

• Added ability to change widget playback control buttons size
• Allows changing remote related settings during playback
• Added options to manually configure Chromecast IP from extension settings
• Nautilus extension should now also work with Nemo file manager (use this to cast media to your Chromecast from the Nautilus/Nemo context menu)
• Added NVENC (Nvidia) hardware acceleration (previously Cast to TV only supported VAAPI)
• Added option to transcode both video and audio (previously Cast to TV only supported video transcoding); an option to only transcode audio will be added in a future release
• Replaced outdated Chromecast controlling node module with new custom chromecast-controller
• Updated multicast-scanner which can now scan the network, and then find and connect to desired Chromecast much faster than before
• Added support for GNOME Shell 3.34

The Cast to TV developer has also been working on a separate module for casting web links from your desktop to a Chromecast or other device in your network, which uses youtube-dl under the hood (so you need to have youtube-dl installed for this to work). The release notes mention that this is basically an extension to Cast to TV, and so it's not clear if it will be accepted on the GNOME Shell Extensions website. Meanwhile, if you want to give this a try, you can find manual installation instructions on its GitHub project page.

After installing the Cast to TV Links addon, you'll find a new "Link" item in the Cast to TV menu that opens a dialog where you can paste the link you want to cast, as seen in the above screenshot. Its settings can be found on the Cast to TV Add-ons tab (not visible until you install the Links addon), and allow setting the preferred format, path to youtube-dl, maximum video quality, as well as the preferred language.

Other Chromecast-related articles you might like:

• fx_cast Adds Chromecast Support To Firefox
• Cast Videos To Chromecast On Linux With Gnomecast

Install Cast to TV extension for GNOME Shell

While Cast to TV is available on extensions.gnome.org, it hasn't been updated to the latest version at the time I'm publishing this article. The extension also requires manually installing some dependencies. For step by step installation instructions from source, see this article (scroll down to "How to install..." part).

You may also want to install some additional tools that extend Cast to TV:

• Cast to TV Links addon (to cast web links through Cast to TV)
• Playercast (a simple app that runs in the background, turning any Linux computer on the same network into a receiver for Cast to TV - I covered this in a previous article)