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The Unofficial Apple Events App for MacOS with Chromecast Support (github.com/insidegui)
97 points by insidegui on Oct 24, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments



Did you reverse engineer the Chromecast protocol ? Or is it opensource now ?


The Chromecast protocol specification (CASTV2) itself is sort of open. To implement it on macOS I did a little bit of reverse engineering and used a description of the protocol I found here: https://github.com/thibauts/node-castv2


It's open source - https://developers.google.com/cast/


But unfortunately is only available for "Android, Chrome or iOS app"

So this means other applications like Firefox, VLC etc... would have to reverse engineer the protocol.


VLC has Chromecast support in the development version, and has had it for over a year now. They had to reverse-engineer the protocol. I think the UI is a bit cludgey but it works.


reverse engineering != porting to an other platform

edit: but is it really open source as said by previous comment or is it just an SDK ?


It's closed source. This project uses an open source implementation he wrote himself: https://github.com/insidegui/ChromeCastCore

> This framework implements the Google Cast APIs so they can be used in macOS apps. Google provides an official SDK but it is only for iOS and closed source.


There might be a naming clash here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_event


Hahahahaha true!


Yes, I went to the link quite happy because I thought it was related to AppleEvents and maybe Apple Scripts. Your app is definitely cool, congratulations on your work but the name got me fooled.

PS: Maybe the HN people haven't used MacOS 9 and AppleScript a lot and will not do the association I did.


This is nice. Though, I plan on going through the source code later, can you give a short gist of how it works?


I don't know which part you're most interested in, but in a nutshell: the events are fetched from the same API as the Apple TV Events app (found that using a proxy), the Chromecast streaming uses Bonjour to find Chromecast devices on the network and the CASTV2 protocol over TCP to send commands to them.


How what works ? Are you asking about the fetching of the streams or the Chromecast support ?


I've done a lot of cast hacking for my employer-- very interested in this :)


Fantastic! Thanks for the continued work Guilherme!




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