Casting with Raspberry Pi

Stream to XBMC Chrome Extension

When Raspberry Pi came out first, I immediately got one thinking I would make use of it as a media center. I installed raspbmc too. I liked everything about it except for how slow the menus were. Everything was working but going to where you want is very slow. I wanted to make use of the “Free Cable” plugin to keep up with the current TV shows I was watching. It worked well enough. I didn’t want to connect a mouse and keyboard. That is the last thing I wanted. I just wanted to use my remote control.

There were a few chrome plugins available online to push videos from sites like Youtube to XBMC. But, I watch online videos from various sites for which there were no plugins. So, I set towards writing my own plugin. I went through Chrome Extensions site and found out Content Scripts were the best way to do it. I started with a simple site I use to stream movies called Einthusan. All I had to was to scrape the website for the video link and push it to XBMC using JSONRPC. Hard part was following all the restrictions of Chrome Extensions. It eventually worked.

I extended the plugin to make it work with a few online streaming sites:

1. allmyvideos.net
2. vidto.me
3. played.to
4. megafiles.se
5. bestreams.net

This was enough for most of my online streaming needs.

Recently, I extended the plugin to push video links from CBS.com to raspbmc. Work is almost entirely derived from what is present in Free Cable XBMC plugin (thanks to bluecop). Eventually, I want to extend the plugin to include support for all the sites supported by Free Cable.

When I started out, I didn’t expect the plugin to come this far. I could work on extending it to other sites and leave it to the pros. So, I have uploaded the entire code to github here. I can always help keep the original plugin updated if someone wants to contribute. You can find the original chrome extension here – Stream to XBMC.