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Trying to master the use of your new Chromecast can be quite the task. Most users tend to stick with official devices and applications, but there is much more you can do with your streaming dongle. Fling is one of the great third-party Chromecast services around, and it has just been opened to the public!
With Fling, one can stream locally-stored video from a computer to your Chromecast. The app runs on Java, making it pretty much compatible across all PC platforms. It should run on any OS that can support Oracle’s Java.
It is really a simple tool. There is no need for servers, browsers or anything. Simply open the native app and drag/drop your files. The video should start playing right away.
Everything should be fine as long as the video format is supported by Chromecast. There is a healthy list of supported formats, but if you happen to have weird video formats that is not an issue. The app also has an experimental feature that allows you to transcode the video with the help of VLC. Pretty sweet!
I love that this app has all the pros and very few cons. It is simple and to the point, yet it is very full-featured and well-supported. The fact that you can use VLC to encode any video is surprising. Cross-platform support and the simple UI simply close the deal.
It’s all free and you can get it straight from Leon Nicholls. If you are a developer, you can even look into the code! It’s all open-sourced. Enjoy!
eek.. just say no to Java. Thanks for the development though.
I love java especially french vanilla
Funny, I also avoided messing around with this specifically cause of Java :/
You know what you guys are???
Anti Java-ites!
Rabid anti-Java-ites!!
+ 1 good sir
Boycotting Android too?
I’ll take a look at it, thanks.
Awesome, now I can watch Milfs Like it Big in my living room.
Nice work by the dev. Tried it out though and needs to transcode most videos in order to send it to the chromecast device…
Seeing as all my files are large MKV files not exactly practical. I tried dropping a 1080p mkv file and didn’t seem to trigger any transcoding, perhaps I’m doing something wrong (yes I do have VLC installed)
“ChromeCast devices only support a very limited number of media formats. Fling has experimental support for converting other media formats into WebM using the vlcj library for VLC.”
“Note that converting video is very CPU intensive. It might take several seconds for the video to start playing on your ChromeCast device”
No fault of the dev, and hes built in a way to transcode thru VLC player. Just not practical for my uses, but good work!
I have to disagree with your statement of “health list of supported formats”. There’s a whole lot more video format out there, and what Chromecast supports is a tiny fraction of the total. Hell it doesn’t even support AVI as a container, which is an extremely popular container.
Well, I tried it with a mp4 and I get no audio though fling/chromecast, but do playing locally.
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eek.. just say no to Java. Thanks for the development though.
updated to lates VLC and it finally started working – my bad.
While this basically accomplishes a similar task to aircast, but on my laptop instead of phone. It seems far more “beta” than aircast. Provides very minimal information to what is going on, you are left wondering if it’s not working or if you just need to wait. I got it working with .mp4. MKV and AVI resulted in nothing happening. There is a Play, pause and stop button, but there is no scrubber or fast forward/rewind and no volume control. Pros-it was a microscopic file to install, and does work without using every ounce of my processor like mirroring does. Hopefully they can get this up to the google chromecast recommended standards.
Works really good for me. Just need to be able to rewind/forward though.
Great app! A seekbar would be nice :-)
Dude, does this steam directly from our system through local network.
Or does it require internet connection so that it uploads and streams
to the cast as the native function of cast from Goog?
I wonder, if this stream directly, this could be a future where we could
hv wifi monitors, when the whole screen sharing happens in high qual..
i wouldn’t get your hopes up. There are limitations to the hardware at this point. for instance, even if you could mirror a perfect hd picture from your computer, you still have to deal with latency. the latency needs to be essentially zero for it to be your primary screen. Also even with movies you run into issues like yes the picture may run smoothly on your tv/monitor, but you have to use tv/monitor not computer speakers, because the computer is a second or 2 ahead and out of sync
Just get Plesk and use the regular chromecast plugin…
I drag a 400mb mkv file to the app and it does nothing. Am I doing something wrong?!
MKV is actually a container file, which is why most streaming devices have a hard time with them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska