TITLE: How I cast Youtube videos to the TV

TITLE: How I cast Youtube videos to the TV
DATE: 2020-07-15
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
====================================================================

I've seen other people using a Chromecast and an Android phone to
play Youtube videos on their TV. I wanted to do the same thing but
instead I wanted to use my laptop. It turns out this is pretty
difficult without using Google Chrome. I have since come up with a
system which works reasonably well.

I use Qutebrowser as my web browser. I configured qutebrowser to
pipe videos to VLC using this keybinding in my
~/.qutebrowser/config.py:

[Qutebrowser]: https://qutebrowser.org/
[VLC]: https://www.videolan.org/vlc

config.bind(',m', 'hint --rapid links spawn open -a VLC.app
{hint-url}')

This allows me to press ,m while on a youtube page which displays
thumbnails for videos, then select a video, which opens VLC and
plays the video. This gets rid of any adverts.

To pipe the video to my Chromecast I can use the menu bar in VLC to
select "Playback" -> "Renderer", then my Chromecast, which is
listed as an option if both are on the same local network.

To adjust the volume on the chromecast I use go-cast from the
terminal:

[go-cast]: https://github.com/barnybug/go-cast

cast -name "CHROMECAST NAME" volume 0.6