Castor: Open-Source Tool to Cast Web Video to Your TV
Original: Better and Cheaper Than IPTV
Why This Matters
Castor highlights growing demand for self-hosted, open-source media tools as alternatives to commercial streaming infrastructure.
Castor is an open-source CLI tool that points at any web page, extracts the video stream, transcodes it in real time, and casts it to a TV. It supports direct stream URLs, IMDB/TMDB IDs, and burns in subtitles — no Chromecast or AirPlay required.
Castor is an open-source project by GitHub user 'stupside' that solves a common problem: Smart TVs cannot cast arbitrary web video, and screen mirroring is laggy with resolution drops. Castor works by pointing it at any web page URL, automatically finding the embedded video, extracting the raw stream, transcoding it for TV compatibility, and casting it in real time — all from a terminal. The tool also accepts direct stream URLs or IMDB/TMDB identifiers and can burn subtitles into the stream. Built in Go and distributed with a Dockerfile for easy deployment, Castor has accumulated 671 GitHub stars and 14 forks since its release. The README describes the project plainly: 'I built it because I couldn't cast web video from my laptop to my TV: no Chromecast, no AirPlay.' Configuration is handled via a config.yaml file, and the project includes a Makefile and GitHub Actions CI pipeline.