skorokithakis/catt

Cast All The Things, known as catt, is a command-line tool that lets you send videos from your computer or from online sources to a Chromecast device on your network. A Chromecast is a small dongle that plugs into a TV's HDMI port and plays streaming content. This tool gives you a way to control what it plays without going through a phone app or browser extension. The simplest use is pasting a video URL into the terminal and having it start playing on your TV immediately. It supports any website that the yt-dlp downloader supports, which covers YouTube, Vimeo, and a few hundred other video hosting services. You can also point it at a local video file on your computer and cast that directly, as long as the file format is one the Chromecast handles natively. If you have a subtitle file alongside a video, catt will detect it automatically and convert common subtitle formats to the type the Chromecast accepts before sending them over. Beyond playing video, catt can send any website to the Chromecast for display on the TV screen, and it includes commands for basic playback control such as pausing and resuming. If you own multiple Chromecasts, a configuration file lets you set a default device or create short alias names so you do not have to type the full device name each time. Installation is straightforward through standard Python package tools. The project notes that if catt stops working with a particular video site, upgrading the underlying yt-dlp package usually fixes it, since yt-dlp is updated frequently to keep pace with site changes. The project is free software released under the BSD license. It is built on top of three other open-source libraries: pychromecast for communicating with the device, yt-dlp for extracting video URLs, and casttube for the YouTube-specific Chromecast API.