cast-photo-saver

photo screen saver for chromecast

##fixme

Setup

To use this you'll need a chromecast developer account.

See: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/developers#Get_started

You'll need to put one of your devices in development mode and set up a test development app.

See: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/registration

At This Screen you will first add a new test device then add a new application.

Pick whatever name you want and a custom receiver URL that should be:

http://192.168.0.100:8000/index.html

Replacing that IP address with whatever server you will be sharing your images from. That server is also where you git-clone this project to, make a virtualenv and install dependencies and run the app from. Remember your google-assigned app-id for later.

On the local machine do whatever your platform equivalent of these commands is (e.g. I do approx this on my mac)

git clone https://github.com/minektur/cast-photo-saver.git
virtualenv cast-photo-saver
cd cast-photo-saver
. bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

edit src/cast-photo-saver.py and change PICS to point to wherever your giant nested folder of pictures lives. (Note you can move the base www document root here also if you want)

edit src/startme.py to put in your chromecast IP address and your chrome app ID from before.

run the server and start the cast app:

cd src
./cast-photo-saver.py > /dev/null &
./startme.py

Enjoy.

The performance of the cast device on (non-hardware-accelerated) CSS transforms leaves a lot to be desired. I'm planning on changing the html/javascript to make transitions nicer in some way. Or not...

Ideas:

• performance/CSS limitations
  • split work up
    • load-offscreen early
    • transition in way after loading?
  • opacity changes instead?
  • javascript instead of css?
  • transcode images to lower res on the fly
  • load pre-rendered html5 snippets?
  • turn the whole thing into hardware accelerated stream?
  • 3d transforms?
  • requestanimationframe magic on my own?
  • see https://plus.google.com/110558071969009568835/posts/NMDm5mDhm6J for more ideas
  • http://www.paulirish.com/2012/why-moving-elements-with-translate-is-better-than-posabs-topleft/
  • non-video elements restricted to 720P https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlbinEkblom/posts/JDhtJTw7jz5

still left to do

• autostart of cast app (startme integration)
• daemonization
• config file/command line options
• maybe? move to control over cast channel
• use pychromecast to auto-detect device by name

##license See LICENSE file for details. MIT/Beerware in general

Proto file for chromecast protobuf format MIT license from Chromium source repo