NymphCast – Open-source Chromecast Alternative
I don't understand the point behind "casting" something in a home environment, unless one keeps the client unsupervised. It could make sense in contexts where say one or more unsupervised signage displays are connected to small embedded boards that throw at the screens whatever feed is being streamed to them. That would be ok, but what about home environments?<p>Let me give an example. I keep all my media in a home NAS (Nas4Free plus RAID etc.) as simple files (mpeg4 etc.). My home TV is connected to a RPi running Kodi that accesses the file list through SMB/NFS shares, as every other computer in the house.
If I want to watch a movie, I use Kodi to navigate the file list until I find the relevant file and play it. There are no downsides since it's a one click solution, and the pretty good CEC support by Kodi and the RPi makes it a breeze (one single remote for both the TV and Kodi) but this way the file is being transcoded by the player (the RPi) and not by the streming hardware, which would be an often less powerful platform like a NAS.
This also means the streamed content travels as compressed packets through the network, in fact loading it a lot less than for example it would happen when streaming it after transcoding. As a result, I could have like 10 machines watching each one its own Full HD movie on a home wired network, which would be unthinkable if the poor NAS had to transcode all of them on the fly, not to mention the much heavier network load.<p>So the question is: what's the point in streaming in home environments rather than navigating file shares?