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I should be able to play local video files (.avi) by dragging and dropping into Chrome browser on my laptop. I've seen Youtube demonstrations of how this works. But when I do this the video file it treated as a download by Chrome - it downloads the file and then plays it with my default media player which is VLC. This is not what I want. I want Chrome to play the video so that I can cast it to my newly-installed Chromecast and watch it on my TV.
Anyone know what might be wrong?
Yeah they are probably using a plugin I image as a browser (as far as Im aware) only has support for videos via html5, and so mp4, ogg and webm video formats.
plex media server https://plex.tv/downloads
or
realplayer cloud http://www.real.com/resources/chromecast/
found info on http://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/c...ts_with_chrome
Hmm....I installed RealPlayer Cloud on my laptop. Dropped a video file onto it and checked that it would play Ok in RealPlayer itself. No problem, perfect playback. But.....there is no indication of how to cast the video to Chromecast. No 'button' to click on. This is very frustrating. To quote from Real.com:
"Each of the RealPlayer Cloud apps will come with a little button on the top-right corner that will allow you to cast videos from the device to your TV. You can even control the playback of your videos from the device, so your device in essence becomes a remote control."
Clearly I am doing something fundamentally wrong. I'll try Plex instead.
I'm not sure if it will work with avi files - try it with an mp4 to test.
Edit: OK I'm tired, that probably wasn't too helpful, but there's no harm in checking it's working with an mp4 file anyway. The Chromecast only has hardware decode capability for certain codecs e.g. h.264. AFAIK, if you want to stream non-supported files it would involve either transcoding them to a supported format in advance, or doing it on-the-fly with something like plex.
Edit2: I've just found this post, there might be some useful information: http://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/c..._i_play_local/
I tried playing various mp4 video files in Chrome with hitty-missy results. Some would play OK, some only had audio. Gave up on that. Tried using Realplayer Cloud but couldn't cast video to my Chromecast for reasons that are unclear. Eventually turned to Plex and this gave me what I wanted. I can now play a video file on my laptop and cast it to my living room TV without problems. Yay!
Only certain mp4 files working might be down the the codec they use - mp4 is a container and can use codecs besides h.264 for the video.
In some cases plex may only have to remux the input files into another container if the codecs themselves are supported, however if that's not the case it will have to transcode the video. So just bear in mind that will be heavy on the CPU and ensure the laptop is well-ventilated.
The reason VLC is playing it is because you have VLC registered as the default player for avi files. Windows needs to be told what you application it should use to play video files - you can't blame it for doing what it has been told. You need to change the default action.