What is castor?

Castor is a command line tool that casts online video from your computer to your TV. Instead of using screen mirroring, which is often laggy and lowers resolution, Castor finds the actual video stream behind a web page, converts it into a format your TV can play, and sends that real stream to the TV at full quality. You point Castor at a web page you are watching, or at a direct video stream link, and it does the rest. To find the video, it opens a hidden browser window, watches the network traffic in the background, and clicks through the page automatically until playback starts. This works on pages that allow this kind of automated interaction, and the project is upfront that it will not work on every site. It can also look up a movie or TV episode by its IMDB or TMDB id against sources you configure yourself, and it can add auto generated subtitles burned directly into the video. Castor runs as a program on your own computer rather than as a hosted service, since it needs to be on the same network as your TV to find it. It relies on Chrome or Chromium plus ffmpeg and ffprobe being installed and available on your system, and those last two need to be a fairly recent version. On a Mac it can be installed with Homebrew, or it can be built from source using Go, which requires cloning with submodules and building with make. Once installed, you tell Castor which TV to use in a config file, then either browse and cast titles interactively through a text based menu in the terminal, or cast a specific web page or stream URL directly from the command line. Settings like maximum video resolution, TMDB API keys for searching titles, and subtitle generation are all optional and can be adjusted in that same config file.