Is Mkchromecast functionnal ? What are the other options to cast ??

Corbalte · July 31, 2023, 10:52am

Hi everyone,

My fiancee has bought a Chromecast recently and I’m trying to cast my screen through it (I’m on Gnome). Since her shared Netflix account doesn’t work anymore, I’ve been trying to cast it from the Linux app on my computer for convenience.

It seems Mkchromecast is the best option (or rather the only one ?) on Linux. Now I’ve managed to make it work trough Chromium embedded cast system, which is good enough for most things.

But Mkchromecast isn’t working well for me (it just cast the app icon on my screen when launching from terminal). I might open a ticket on github for this, but I wonder if people here are using it and maybe have recommandations to make it work thoroughly ? Or if maybe there is an alternative to cast your screen ?

Thanks a lot !

manuel · July 31, 2023, 1:54pm

Not using chromecast so cannot recommend any alternative.
But there seems to be alternatives, you’ll see them e.g. with command:

yay -Ss chromecast

d-air1 · July 31, 2023, 1:55pm

I thought catt was the best option for casting anything https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt. I’m maintaining a package for it in the aur https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/catt. Otherwise you can install it following the directions on the github. Since I’m using KDE, I know of Qt GUI frontend for it https://github.com/soreau/catt-qt. Which I am also maintaing an aur package for https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/catt-qt. I could have sworn a few years ago when I was using gnome there was an extension for that used catt under the hood. Let me see what I can find.

d-air1 · July 31, 2023, 1:59pm

I was wrong. The extension I used to use was https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1544/cast-to-tv/. It wasn’t using catt, but it worked well. Looks like it has not been updated since 3.36 which is right before I stopped using Gnome.

d-air1 · July 31, 2023, 2:03pm

Also now that I think about it. Last time I was doing this, I’m pretty sure I ran into issues with the firewall. This may have caused your initial issue. You might wanna look into what ports you need to allow through the firewall in order to make casting work. As a quick test when trying these solutions though. You can temporarily disable the firewall just to see if the casting works at all.

swh · July 31, 2023, 2:36pm

I found something here that refers to the ports of the firewall. Maybe it is helpful for you.
I’m sure when i tested chromecast i was able to adjust those ports in my firewalld and get chromecast running.

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/muff1nman/16a8cd8a46c191f305afdf2b97cc2adf

chromecast-ssdp.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<service>
  <short>chromecast-ssdp</short>
  <port protocol="udp" port="1900"/>
  <destination ipv4="239.255.255.250/32"/>
</service>

chromecast.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<service>
  <short>chromecast</short>
  <description>Chromecast</description>
  <port protocol="udp" port="32768-61000"/>
  <port protocol="tcp" port="8008-8009"/>
  <source-port protocol="udp" port="32768-61000"/>
</service>

firewalld-chromecast.sh

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --new-service=chromecast
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --service=chromecast --set-description=Chromecast
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --service=chromecast --set-short=chromecast
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --service=chromecast --add-port=32768-61000/udp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --service=chromecast --add-port=8008-8009/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --service=chromecast --add-source-port=32768-61000/udp

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --new-service=chromecast-ssdp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --service=chromecast-ssdp --set-description=Chromecast SSDP
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --service=chromecast-ssdp --set-short=chromecast-ssdp

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d-air1 · July 31, 2023, 6:50pm

Oh yeah, that huge udp port range looks familiar.