picast

Play media from your computer on a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a TV.

Some people have a raspberry pi (or other small ARM computer) plugged into a TV or big screen of some kind. It can be useful to play videos or youtube videos on it sometimes. picast is a command line tool for sending local media or youtube urls to the pi's screen.

Setup

Raspberry Pi

$ npm install --global picast

$ picast --serve

Make sure omxplayer is installed.

Laptop, Desktop, Phone (via Termux)

On the same local network as the Pi, run

$ npm install --global picast

$ picast media.mp4

It will find the Pi and instruct it to stream the media from the local machine.

You can control the omxplayer instance from stdin in this terminal.

Usage

  picast --serve

    Run a picast server. Prints its IP address and port to stdout.

  picast [-h HOST] FILE

    Play a local file on the pi. Optionally specify the IP address. Defaults to
    10.0.0.32 otherwise.

  picast [-h HOST] URL

    Play the video at URL. This uses the external program youtube-dl to try and
    find and play any embedded video on the website. Requires youtube-dl be
    installed on the pi.

Youtube videos

If you replace media.mp4 above with a YouTube URL (or anything youtube-dl can play), it will stream it on the pi. Requires youtube-dl be installed on the pi.

License

ISC