Armed with an Android cellphone or tablet, you can easily feed content to the Chromecast dongle connected to your TV set. Just call a Chromecast-capable application, such as YouTube, Google Music, or the Vimeo Couch Mode app, tap the Chromecast icon, and a few seconds later, the desired content appears on your TV. Wouldn't it be great to be able to control Chromecast via your PC, though? Now, the Chromecast client Castnow [1] for Linux and Mac systems lets you control your Chromecast from a terminal window.

Casting with Castnow

Castnow is a command-line tool based on Node.js [2] that supports playing multimedia content on a Chromecast dongle – without having to touch an Android device. Castnow supports playing local music files or movies, YouTube clips, movies stored on the network, and even directly from torrents. The program also lets you connect to an existing Chromecast session and control it from your computer. You just need an Android or iOS device with the Chromecast application to set up the program.

The system requirements are a current version of Node.js and optionally a tool for recoding videos to Ffmpeg. On Ubuntu, you can install Node.js, including the matching package manager npm, in the Node.js package from the package sources – but even Ubuntu 14.10 has an ancient version of the framework. You will thus want to install Node.js from the PPA package source by Chris Lea [3] (Listing 1). The package source provided by NodeSource for Debian and Ubuntu [4], in contrast, takes you to a Node.js version that Castnow does not yet support.

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