Raspberry PI ChromeCast-like server and Google Chrome extension
I am happy to present RPI-Cast a Google Chrome's extension that will turn your Raspberry PI into a Google Chromecast-like device. Once everything is installed and configured, you'll be able to play videos on your TV and command their reproduction (volume, pause-play and time) directly from your Google Chrome Browser (from your laptop or smart-phone devices).
This is the easy part. First you need to download my RPI-cast extension (RPI-cast) and import it on your Google Chrome browser (using the chrome://extensions configuration page).
Inside the RPI-cast settings page use your Raspberry Pi IP address and store your configuration (the port I am using by default is 8888).
This is the tricky part, two files are required on the Raspberry Pi:
dbuscontrol.sh is used to send D-bus signals to Omxplayer (in order to change the volume, toogle pause and play, etc). This script should be placed inside /usr/bin or in a folder known by the $PATH environmental variable.
websocket_server.py is a Python script that launches a server and listens all messages from the browser (your will need to install Tornado's Websockets package on the Raspberry PI).
The last thing to do is to run our websocket_server.py script automatically after booting the Raspberry Pi. I use Arch Linux for ARM, so systemd is my service manager, I just created a configuration file named picast.service which contains
[Unit]
Description=Raspberry PI Cast Project
Requires=
Wants=
[Service]
User=root
WorkingDirectory=/root
ExecStart=/root/websocket_server.py
PIDFile=/tmp/websocket_server.pid
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target and I just put it inside /etc/systemd/system.
To enable the picast service we run systemctl enable picast and we can start it using systemctl start picast.