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How to use Chromecast from Firefox

In this quick post, I'll show you how to get the cast button in Firefox, enabling you to play media on your Chromecast or Android TV device straight from your

Latest Post Screenshots as a layer of interoperability by Aleksandar Todorović public

In this quick post, I'll show you how to get the cast button in Firefox, enabling you to play media on your Chromecast or Android TV device straight from your non-Chrome browser.

The end result.

The simpler method would be to install fx_cast add-on and the associated bridge. However, it only supports a handful of websites . The slightly-more complicated method will bump that number to over a thousand.

To achieve this, you're going to need a couple of cross-platform tools:

  1. Cast All The Things , a Python utility allowing you to cast from any URL supported by YouTube-DL (Example: sudo apt install python3-pip && pip3 install catt).
  2. External Application Button Firefox Extension, which will allow us to add a custom button to Firefox's interface.
  3. A NodeJS client that the extension communicates with.

So in short, whenever you click on the button in Firefox, the extension will execute catt command, which will cast media to your Chromecast/Android TV device.

This method works with any of the over 1000 websites supported by YouTube-DL, making it much more useful than the "official" method in Chrome. You don't have to rely on website owners to support casting their media — if YouTube-DL can download it, you can play it.

How to set it up

All you have to do is fill out the first three fields in External Application Button's preferences:

  1. Display Name: Cast
  2. Executable Name: full path to your catt file (on Linux-based system, you can execute which catt to get this information)
  3. Arguments: catt [HREF]
Screenshot of the three fields mentioned above filled out.
How it should look like.

Next you'll want to upload an icon. Here's black and white version of the Chromecast's logo. Use the appropriate one depending on your Firefox theme.

Drawbacks

This method only allows you to play the media. You won't be able to adjust the volume, pause the playback, or stop it completely. However, you can do that and much more from the terminal.

Full list of catt commands (you can always reach this list with catt -h):

With these tools at your disposal, you can be confident that you can switch from Chrome to Firefox without losing control of your Chromecast-enabled device. If you haven't already, switch to Firefox !

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Aleksandar Todorović

Published 4 years ago

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