transcoding testers wanted

As you might have read we are working on a new castnow version (v0.5) which has the goal to do smarter transcoding and enable player controls like seeking, play/pause on files while they are transcoding (besides other goals).

Smarter transcoding: There are often video files where you only need to transcode the audio stream and not the video stream to get it chromecast-compatible (often the case for .mkv files). Currently castnow always transcodes both (video and audio). Within v0.5 only the required streams should be transcoded.

Player controls: see https://github.com/xat/castnow/issues/58

I've now created a small commandline tool (for testing) which tries to archive those goals by using HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and https://github.com/xat/chromecast-can-play. You can install it with

npm install hlscast -g

Playback of a local video file can be started like this:

hlscast ./myvideo.mkv

These player controls are availible:

space: toggle between play and pause
left: seek backward
right: seek forward

Of course ffmpeg is required for this to work.

I would love feedback how well this works for people and what problems occur.