How to play streaming video in Chromecast?

Question

According to the Chromecast Developers page, Chromecast supports the SmoothStreaming container, which I assume uses pieces of video with the .ismv extension. I am having problems playing these video files.

If I'm not mistaken, the implementation of the Chrome / Chromecasts video tag only supports .mp4 and .webm files, so using cast.MediaLoadRequest (in the Chrome Sender app) will not work if you give it the manifest URL of the manifest or .ismv.

It seems possible to write code that stitches MPEG-DASH fragments using the MediaSource API from the MPEG-DASH manifest file. However, the Chrome implementation in the MediaSource specification does not seem to support .ismv chunks, and therefore a smooth streaming video playback tool.

Assuming you have analyzed the manifest file to get smooth streaming video fragments, how can Chromecast play in .ismv h.264 containers like the ones you can find here ? Or does Chrome not support .ismv files? If so, which SmoothStreaming containers support Chrome / Chromecast?

Answer 1

Chromecast supports MPEG-DASH and Smooth Streaming. See here for more details:

https://developers.google.com/cast/supported_media_types

Soon we will provide a code snippet for a smooth flow. Stay with us.

Answer 2

The default receiver does not support SmoothStreaming (and MPEG-DASH).

To do this, you need to encode your own receiver.

See fooobar.com/questions/1494417 / ... for more details.

Hopefully Google will publish live live streaming examples soon!

Answer 3

You can drop SmoothStreaming at some receivers provided by Google. cast-custom-receiver and Cast-Media-Player-Library-Sample supports SS with PlayReady Encryption out of the box.

Well, you need to do some tricks, for example, change the extension from "ism /" to "ism / Manifest", and it just works. You will need to do the same in [cast-sender-tool-chrome] by adding the file extension to the list of three in the main html file.