Castor: A Better and Cheaper Alternative to IPTV for Streaming
Better and Cheaper Than IPTV
I built Castor, a command-line tool that extracts video streams from websites and casts them directly to your TV via DLNA or Chromecast. By using headless Chrome to bypass basic bot protection and ffmpeg for real-time transcoding, Castor eliminates the lag and quality loss of screen mirroring. You can browse TMDB metadata, search for titles, and even burn in auto-generated subtitles without leaving your terminal.
Imagine buying a very nice TV and figuring out it doesn't allow casting from random websites... Then you switch to the longest HDMI cable you can find. Then you start doing screen mirroring: your computer lags, resolution tanks, nothing feels right.
- dtagames
For a no hacks alternative, I built TV Explorer. It puts the channel's published HLS stream into your browser with no interim steps. Uses the public GitHub list of more than 10,000 free channels.
- inigyou
This situation where bots have to run a headless browser in a new profile is just stupid. Can we have the old internet back? Please? Cloudflare you're not stopping bots, you're just wasting effort on both sides while siphoning access logs and passwords to the NSA.
- hperrin
> I built it because I couldn't cast web video from my laptop to my TV: no Chromecast, no AirPlay.
Looks like Claude built it.
- krackers
I thought the whole point of turnstile was that it detects headless browsers and it's supposed to be "difficult" to bypass. Apparently this just simulates clicking on the checkmark. Is it really that easy?
- slg
Usually piracy software tries to maintain a little plausible deniability, but here this is suggesting it will help you stream this weekend's newly released $250m blockbuster.
- rideontime
Seems to be missing some context. What is this used for? Piracy?
- stef25
Immediately worked for me on a simple Samsung bought 15+ years ago.
What's the best way to use it, write your own search to parse all the json pages https://vsembed.ru/movies/latest/page-1.json ?
- j45
This is interesting, instead of a command line interface it made me wonder what an interface right on the tv could look like.
Comparisons to watching tv, are usually a TV interface, with a TV device/app, be it an Android TV/Apple TV, etc.
Maybe I'm missing it, I couldn't see a tv interface.
The part where it can send video to any kind of tv is a pretty remarkable piece.