This is a long overdue article and I decided to post it so I can simply send it to all those who ask me about the best but also easiest way to play local videos on a Chromecast.

Some may prefer other ways of playing local videos on Chromecast, including using a command line tool such as stream2chromecast, pulseaudio-dlna to  play music from a computer to a Chromecast, as well as the VideoStream Chromecast extension (which I hear is unreliable lately).

Plex is, however, the complete solution for all local media streaming to Chromecast needs, and is fairly easy to set up, despite my long article.

It can be used to stream local videos (and can transcode videos not supported by Chromecast), music, and photos, both in your local network as well as remotely, e.g. to a hotel or a friend's house.

Furthermore, Plex Media Server is cross-platform, so it can be installed on an a Linux, FreeBSD, Windows or Mac computer, as well as on NAS.

The application is written in Qt and besides the icons, it integrates pretty well under GNOME, including desktop notifications and an AppIndicator for Unity.

A while back we wrote how to play YouTube videos without Flash with just one click. The second method (my favourite) used to work with any browser but the latest Flash 10.2 breaks it because the cached files are deleted from /tmp (but are still there). With the help of Reddit, I got it working again and with a minor tweak it works with any browser (I've only tested it with Firefox and Chromium).

What is this about really? Using this method to play YouTube videos, you still need Flash installed but all you have to do is start a video in the browser so it's downloaded in the cache but then you can click "pause" (but don't close the tab!), then click a button on your panel (or you can assign a keyboard shortcut or whatever) which will launch that video in VLC or Mplayer.

WatchVideo is a Qt application (but also comes with a command-line version) to play, download, rip or convert (to Ogg) videos from Bliptv, Break, CaracolTV, CineGratis24h, CollegeHumor, Current, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Sapovideos, TheOnion, Vimeo, YouTube, and others. 

What makes WatchVideo special is that besides being able to download videos from many video sharing websites, it can also rip/convert and play them, either using an external player (such as Totem or VLC) or you can use the internal player (mplayer - this is an experimental feature in the latest version). The rip/convert/play actions can be set to occur once a video has finished downloading which is a real time-saver feature. WatchVideo also comes with NotifyOSD notifications for Ubuntu users.

A quick update: a while back we wrote about 'fixing' the GTK-RecordMyDesktop videos for uploading to YouTube and other video sharing websites. Well, I don't know what did it but today when I've recorded a video with GTK-RecordMyDesktop and uploaded it to YouTube, it worked with no further tweaking (using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat with up-to-date packages). What's sure is that it wasn't because of GTK-RecordMyDesktop as there were no recent updates to this applications.

As a sample video, see the PyWO video (it has been recorded with GTK-RecordMyDesktop and uploaded as an .ogv to YouTube).

And these are just a few ideas but this can go even further.

This concept is described by Christian Giordano @ Canonical Design blog. Christian also posted a video mockup of this concept, in which he uses "computer-vision", a face recognition library:

HTML5 support finally comes to YouTube, but unfortunately using the proprietary h264 video codec, not the free Theora:

Right now we support browsers that support both the <video> tag in HTML5 and the h.264 video codec. These include:

* Google Chrome
* Apple Safari (version 4+)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame installed