I very recently discovered the very useful pychromecast library, and, being the owner of a Chromecast, I started wondering what I could do with it. Since there aren’t that many things a Chromecast can do (it pretty much only plays videos over the network, although there are some other things as well), I decided to make my own TV station. Thus, Shufflecast was born.

Shufflecast

Shufflecast is a very simple script. All it does is take a directory that contains video files and streams them to a Chromecast, randomly playing one after another. Shufflecast aims to be something like a TV station running continuously in the background, so you can flip to it whenever you feel like it. It doesn’t transcode files, so it’s very low on CPU usage, and it doesn’t have any controls (because you can’t pause a TV station!). In fact, if you do manage to pause Shufflecast, it’ll restart playback immediately.

Installation and usage is very simple. Just use pip:

pip install shufflecast

And run it:

shufflecast /home/user/all_my_favorite_videos

And your TV will start playing everything! Randomly! While you watch! Isn’t that great?

Tell me whether it’s great here in the comments or on Twitter!