Chromecast support

[Ico-man]

Support for Chromecast was implemented in new 1.15.168 full version of BSplayer for Android, only experimental for now, should playback most mp4 files.

[ingope]

Great!
Thanks so much.

Works great so far, also HD MKV files play fine.
I just have no sound, no matter what I do.
On the Tablet PC the sound is fine but no sound on the TV.

[Ico-man]

Only mp3, ogg, aac sound are supported by Chromecast.

We can't do anything about it atm without re-encoding the media file, which would be very slow and impractical.

[Rickv]

Hi, I have just tested this new feature on my Nexus 5 and it works very good, great job!

Do you maybe know if it is hard to add subtitles to casting video's, haven't seen these video player apps which support it.

great job!

[ingope]

Originally Posted by Ico-man

Only mp3, ogg, aac sound is supported by Chromecast.

We can't do anything about it atm without re-encoding the media file, which would be very slow and impractical.

Ah ok, I see. Thanks a lot for the info.
Not a big deal with the re-encoding(on the PC), I try it.

[ingope]

Ok, I re-encoded some mkv files with this freeware ( Winnydows Home )

Works good so far. 720p and 1080p works pretty fine.
I just had a few "BSPlayer is not working anymore" while playing
movies on my TV.

But the picture and sound quality is very nice so far.

[mrjeff2000]

I bought bsplayer full version 1.15.168 today and the chromecast works, but when I try to cast vidoes via lan i can see it only on the phone. There is an error casing throw lan maybe something worng with the path, from what I understand it is exparemental. can you fix it please ?? I bought it just for this option!

[candide22]

Originally Posted by Ico-man

Support for Chromecast was implemented in new 1.15.168 full version of BSplayer for Android, only experimental for now, should playback most mp4 files.

Using BS.Player on Nexus 5 to TV via Chromecast dongle and Android Chromecast app. Playing mp4 files, video fine, subtitles work, but no audio. Can you help?

[adicoto]

As stated by Ico-man few posts above:

Only mp3, ogg, aac sound is supported by Chromecast.

[candide22]

Thanks for the prompt reply, Adicoto. My experience is that with mp4 files the video and subtitles transfer to the TV screen but there is no sound with them. Is there a workaround?

[adicoto]

The only workaround is to re-encode the media file so the audio stream is MP3, OGG or AAC (no AC3, DTS...)

[candide22]

Adicoto, the mp4 files have AAC audio. Sound is good with the video when playing on the Android phone with BS.Player, but no sound can be heard on either TV or phone when sending to TV via Chromecast. I would really appreciate any further thoughts you might have on this.

[candide22]

As there is no suggested answer to my question, I have downloaded a player that works, RealPlayer Cloud. Adios.

[Cela]

Originally Posted by BSPeter

Whereas I'm not having the brand "Chromecast" hdmi stick, I'm running BSPlayer for Android on another brand android hdmi stick/dongle on my TV since a while now. These have already been available for similar prices for some time now. (I also gave such a stick to my son who's also running BSPlayer for android on it). I don't know if this might be of any help to you though.

That is very interesting! Which Android stick? Where to buy it? Please give some more details.

Why?
Because, as I see it, Chromecast is a cheap and simple solution: It has only very limited abilities. It can't do any magic which BSplayer can do! Therefore, any Chromecast enabled player is restricted to forward a link to the location of the video and to pray that Chromecast can play it.

So, an Android HDMI stick could forward BSplayer's magic in full HD quality to the screen. So, all videos, via BSplayer's LAN feature even those located somewhere within the user's LAN on computers attached (TeraBytes) disks, could be played without DLNA's and other bottelnecks's restrictions!
I use a Poppy C-200 which gives me NFS access to all my computer videos and, like BSplayer, playes practically everything in native full HD quality. But it is an old, expensive and rather large "dongle".

Android HDMI dongle, running BSplayer, which in turn should allow to get remotely controlled by another BSplayer instance on a smartphone (in the same LAN) would be a cool solution?
Could I use my old Galaxy S2 in such a way? If yes, how to set it up and how to tell the BSplayer in the stationary, HDMI attached S2 from the other side of the room to which media file it should browse for playing on the big screen?
How did you and your son do it?

P.S.
Testing BSplayer's Chromecast, I found this problem:
BSplayer's battery indicator wrongly shows red alarm and 0% battery charge, while indicator in notification bar shows correct value, e.g. 70% in the screenshot!

[Cela]

Originally Posted by candide22

As there is no suggested answer to my question, I have downloaded a player that works, RealPlayer Cloud. Adios.

How does this work, Amigo?
Do you have to duplicately upload your 100+TB media files into RealPlayer Cloud or can your RealPlayer solution browse through the windows file system on your computer in your LAN to every media file and directly play it without further duplication via the Chromecast dongle on your big screen? Will it play via Chromcast all the media files in native, original, untranscoded HD quality? Including AC3 audio? ...

[revand]

I bought BS.Player android app exclusively for displaying my movies stored on Seagate Wireless Plus portable hard drive.
My problem was that the Seagate Media app (both on Android and IOS) is not capable of decoding other formats than the ones the used gadget can decode, so I needed a third party application to watch my films being far from home.
My favorite video player is BS Player, playes on my HTC One almost every video and sound format. I was very happy learning the news from this forum that from this summer BS Player is capable of sending video signal to Chromecast.
I was able to send video to Chromecast locally stored on my phone using BS Player, but unable to send any video coming from my external hard drive (Seagate W+) and either from a NAS on my local network.
Is it possible that BS Player's Chromecast functionality is limited to locally stored videos? Is there a chance to add the above mentioned function later on?
I spent a number of hours seeking a solution how to watch my films on TV, because I am traveling a lot...
I beleive that if BS Player will do the job, a lot of customers will buy the BS Player Android app instead of making a hack on Seagate Wireless Plus.

[hgmichna]

Originally Posted by Ico-man

Only mp3, ogg, aac sound are supported by Chromecast.

That must be one weird piece of hardware, if it cannot do the simplest thing of all, namely forward the digital audio stream as is, without filtering or re-encoding it. Chromecast just died a miserable death in my eyes.

So what is the best alternative? I just tried an HDMI adapter that worked with my previous phone, a Galaxy Nexus, but it seems that the newer phones, like my new OnePlus One, no longer have direct HDMI output.

What should I buy to be able to stream, for example, an MKV file with DTS surround sound (or AC-3 or whatever) to an AV receiver? It would be nice if the player recognized the resolution of the target screen and scaled the video to it, but if not, the AV receiver could also take care of the rescaling, if the HDMI output were the unscaled original. What I would most definitely reject is double rescaling.

I used to use a Windows notebook for this purpose, and this works very well, but the thing just died, and I am looking for alternatives. If there are none, I will just buy another notebook, but I would prefer to move forward and use something more elegant, like an Android device without a cooling fan.

[hgmichna]

This may not be overly relevant for the excellent BS Player, because a full-capability player is actually not needed to forward a movie file to a display.

I have meanwhile tried a few adapters that receive video streams via Wi-Fi. The most interesting one is called EZCast, and I still use it for certain purposes. The thing, , can do four different protocols, namely:

• Miracast
• DLNA
• EZCast
• AirPlay

AirPlay is an Apple protocol. DLNA ist mostly uninteresting because of its severe limitations to only a few video and sound protocol combinations. Miracast works fairly well and simply redisplays the mobile device screen and sound via Wi-Fi Direct.

That leaves the perhaps most interesting protocol, the proprietary EZCast, which does what I wanted—it streams a video file to the display via Wi-Fi or via Wi-Fi Direct.

The EZCast people are in China, and they are pretty active. They send a firmware update about once a month to their adapters, and they are approachable in their support forum, although their support front is not composed of excellent English speakers.

Unfortunately, both Miracast and EZCast suffer from some limitations. They work very well with DVD-resolution videos with stereo sound, and I can recommend that. EZCast comes with its own app, and its "player" nicely remote-controls the streaming, and unlike Miracast it does not show video or sound on the mobile device. However, both cannot stream any kind of surround sound and they drop frames from HD material when there is enough movement in a scene, at least on my OnePlus One smartphone.

This shows perhaps the two weak spots that BS Player might have to overcome—HD video and surround sound. If BS Player wanted to stream such video material over Wi-Fi, it might have to recompress and possibly convert formats like DTS to AC-3 to use DLNA. Or it would have to talk to the EZCast people and join their fray if they allowed outsiders to use their protocol.

Even so the biggest problem may be that contemporary mobile devices do not have enough processor or graphics engine power to smoothly rescale HD material (for example a TV recording from 1080i24 to a projector's 720p60 or a German TV recording from 720p50 to a TV set's or projector's 1080p60) and at the same time convert a DTS-HD MA 7.1 stream to AC-3 5.1 to be DLNA-compatibile or compatible to some other standard.

And I am not sure whether the BS Player crew even wanted to do anything like that at all, because their strength is to display a movie on the mobile device, not to stream its content somewhere else. But if they did it, I would be a happy customer.

I don't know where Chromecast comes into this. It seems unnecessary, but since Google has pushed quite a few of their adapters into the market, BS Player may want to support these as well.

It looks like a different product though. BS Player displays a movie on a mobile device screen, while an app that wanted to stream a local movie from a file to a remote device would be quite a different animal. If the BS Player crew wanted to do that, they might as well write a second app and call it BS Streamer or BS Cast. (Remember, you've read it here first, and I don't reserve any rights for these names. )

[kenchenlly]

You can use Avdshare*Video*Converter to convert MKV to Chromecast supported MP4 or WebM with H.264 High Profile*Level 4.1 or VP8 codec etc