stream-tab

cast one or more web pages to one or more chrome devices programatically. Very useful for streaming your dashboards!

• Auto restarts stream if ffmpeg or chromecast crashes
• uses a custom app to hide control bars (APP ID 62EFD2C1)
• can stream one tab to several chromecasts
• allows you to set cookies (e.g. for login or similar things)

Introduction

This app starts a puppeteer browser instance (in headless mode) and streams the screen to specified chromecast devices.

To get things started you need:

• one webpage you would like to stream ;)
• a chromecast device in your network

Furthermore a working ffmpeg installation is required.

Setup

1. Clone this repository and run npm install
2. run npm run build
3. rename config.example.json to config.json and adapt it to your needs
4. start it with npm run start

Config File

Parameter	Description	Default Value
networkInterface	the network address where the server should run on, e.g. 192.168.0.1
ffmpegExecutable	the path to the ffmpeg executable	ffmpeg
browserExecutable	path to a custom chromium/chrome installation, see Puppeteer Launch Options. E.g. you can set it also to your chrome installation. You need to use chrome (not chromium) if you want to use "directRenderMode"	null
directRenderMode	this allows to skip one transformation via ffmpeg and retrieves the stream in a h264 format. this improves performance, but needs a chrome (not chromium!) as browser instance (set browserExecutable). Furthermore this works best on Windows, not Linux unfortunately.	false
chromecastMapping	specifies which device should get which website stream, you can specify the same stream for several devices. E.g. { "Küche": "KitchenScreen", "Inside Sales": "InsideSalesScreen", "Dev": "DevScreen", "Dev 2": "DevScreen" } this field is optional, if default screen is set.
defaultScreen	for not explicitly mapped chromecast devices, which stream should be used
screens	defines which streams / screens are avaialble. bascially what websites you want to stream.
screens.url	the url of the website
screens.name	a name that you use for chromecastMapping and the defaultScreen config
screens.cookies	a name/value pair for setting cookies (optional)

Known Issues

• Without setting directRenderMode to true the performance can be bad, even with the setting set to true you can run into limits easily if you have several streams running. Unfortunately I haven't found a better way yet for videocasting including audio yet.
• Can crash due to bugs in used libraries, therefore you pm2 or other process manager to auto restart the process

CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME! If you are willing to help, just open a PR or contact me via bug system or [email protected].

Frontend

There is a little status page included, which runs on port 8000 by default. Open http://<networkInterface>:8000/ in your browser.