Display web sites and web apps with Chromecast

google-cast chromecast
kbriggs picture kbriggs · Feb 21, 2014 · Viewed 29.8k times · Source

Can Chromecast be used to display a web site or web app? All the sample sender/receivers I've seen so far show how to play videos. The docs posted so far are minimal as best, just an API reference with little explanation what any of it does. I just want to send a URL of my choosing and have that page displayed on the TV. There's no user interaction required past that point. Assuming that's possible, does anyone have sample Chrome sender and receiver code for that?

Answer

kbriggs picture kbriggs · Feb 22, 2014

I was able to modify the Github sample Project > googlecast/CastHelloText-chrome to show a web page.

  • In the receiver.html file, I replaced the DIV with an IFRAME and styled it for 100% width and height.
  • Then in the displayText() function I changed innerHTML to src.
  • The only modification made to the sender chromehellotext.html was to replace YOUR_APPLICATION_ID with the app id created by registering the receiver.

Note that some sites like Google and Yahoo will not display inside an iframe. If you really needed to do that you could skip the iframe and just set window.location.href to the URL. That, of course, will overwrite your receiver code so the only way to change URLs would be to manually disconnect first and reload. I tried using window.open instead but that did not work.

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