movcaster

Throw a movie from your laptop onto the TV from the comfort of your terminal. 📺

movcaster is a terminal-only (CLI + TUI) tool that streams local video to a DLNA renderer (built for an LG webOS TV) over wifi, with soft and burned-in subtitle support — including the bitmap subtitle tracks (VobSub/PGS/dvd_subtitle) that go2tv just shrugs at. No browser, no app, no cables. One binary.

Binge-friendly, too: it auto-plays the next episode in the folder when one ends, and casts a playlist of files in order.

Install

Homebrew (macOS/Linux — pulls in ffmpeg for you):

brew install juliocesar/tap/movcaster

movcaster is distributed as a cask. To upgrade, refresh the tap first, then upgrade — without brew update the tap metadata is stale and the upgrade is a no-op (note: brew update movcaster is not a thing — update takes no package name; use upgrade to bump a package):

brew update && brew upgrade --cask movcaster

Go (if you have the toolchain):

go install github.com/juliocesar/movcaster@latest

Prebuilt binaries: grab a tarball for your OS/arch from the releases page, unpack it, and drop movcaster somewhere on your PATH.

From source:

git clone https://github.com/juliocesar/movcaster && cd movcaster
go build -o movcaster .

Heads up: every method except Homebrew assumes ffmpeg and ffprobe are on your PATH already (brew install ffmpeg). movcaster shells out to them and will tell you politely if they're missing.

Quick start

# Who's out there?
movcaster -l

# Cast it. Subtitles and codecs are figured out for you.
movcaster "Some Show S01E01.mkv"

That's the whole pitch: point it at a file, hit play, grab the popcorn. 🍿

More examples

# Peek at what's inside (and what subtitle plan it'd pick) without casting:
movcaster --info "Movie (1080p BluRay x265).mkv"

# Pin a specific TV (handy if you own more than one):
movcaster -t 192.168.1.42 episode.mkv

# Bring your own subtitles:
movcaster --sub Movie.es.srt Movie.mkv

# The file has five subtitle tracks and you want track 3 (run --info to list them):
movcaster --sub-track 3 Movie.mkv

# Force the burned-in path (always works, even on the weirdest bitmap subs):
movcaster --burn Movie.mkv

# Silence, please — no subtitles at all:
movcaster --no-subs Movie.mkv

# Binge a season: when an episode ends, the next one in the folder auto-plays
# (press n to skip ahead, --no-next to turn it off):
movcaster "Hannibal S01E01.mkv"

# Got a specific lineup? List the files and play them top to bottom:
movcaster --playlist tonight.txt

The first device you cast to is remembered (~/.config/movcaster/config.json), so plain movcaster <file> keeps finding your TV — even after it reboots and shuffles its DLNA port around.

TUI controls

Once it's playing you get a little control panel:

space play/pause · ←/→ seek 10s · ↑/↓ volume · m mute · s subtitles · n next episode · q quit

Press s to open a subtitle picker: it lists every embedded track, any sidecar file, and Off. Pick one and movcaster re-points the TV at a freshly built stream and resumes where you were (text tracks go soft, bitmap tracks burn in).

All the flags

movcaster -l                       list DLNA renderers on the LAN
movcaster <file>                   cast (auto subtitles + auto codec fallback)
movcaster <file> -t TARGET         target a device (IP, IP:port, or device URL)
movcaster <file> --info            print streams + the chosen subtitle strategy
movcaster <file> --sub foo.srt     force an explicit soft subtitle
movcaster <file> --sub-track N     pick embedded subtitle track N (see --info)
movcaster <file> --burn            burn the selected subtitle into the video
movcaster <file> --soft            force soft subs (errors on bitmap tracks)
movcaster <file> --mux-soft        remux a bitmap track as soft (experimental)
movcaster <file> --no-subs         cast without subtitles
movcaster <file> --transcode       force a codec-compatibility transcode
movcaster <file> --no-next         don't auto-play the next episode when one ends
movcaster --resume                 continue the last played video
movcaster --playlist list.txt      cast each file in a playlist, in order

How subtitles are chosen

movcaster picks a strategy so you don't have to:

1. A sidecar .srt/.vtt (or --sub) → soft subs via the DLNA caption mechanism (sec:CaptionInfoEx). The TV draws them; size/style live in the TV's caption settings.
2. An embedded text track → extracted to WebVTT → soft.
3. A bitmap track (dvd_subtitle/PGS/VobSub) → burned in on the fly with ffmpeg overlay (playback starts in seconds; no full pre-encode). --mux-soft instead remuxes it as a soft track to try the TV's own renderer.

Curious what it'll do? movcaster <file> --info shows the decision without casting.

Resume where you left off

Stop a movie partway and movcaster remembers. Next time you open the same file it picks up right where you stopped — no fiddling with the seek bar. Positions are saved per file (by absolute path) in ~/.movcaster/playback_index when playback stops or you quit. Finished something? It's cleared automatically, so a rewatch starts from the top.

Don't remember which file you had on? movcaster --resume (no file argument) picks the most recently played video and continues it. If that file has since moved, it falls back to the next most recent. From there it behaves like a normal cast, auto-advancing to the next episode on end unless you pass --no-next.

Next episode, automatically

Casting a TV episode? When it ends, movcaster looks in the same folder for the next episode of the same show and casts it — so a season just keeps playing. It reads the season/episode out of the filenames (Hannibal S01E01.mkv → Hannibal S01E02.mkv, tolerating different spacing and casing) and only advances within the same show, so it never wanders off into an unrelated movie sitting in the same folder. Press n to jump to the next episode early, or pass --no-next to switch the whole thing off. A standalone movie with no episode number simply plays and stops.

Playlists

Have a specific lineup in mind? Drop the paths in a text file, one per line, and cast the lot:

movcaster --playlist tonight.txt

# tonight.txt — blank lines and # comments are ignored
/Volumes/media/Hannibal/S01E01.mkv
/Volumes/media/Hannibal/S01E02.mkv
shorts/interlude.mp4          # relative paths resolve from where you run movcaster

It plays them top to bottom; n skips to the next entry, q stops. Absolute paths are used as-is, relative paths resolve against the current directory, and a line pointing at a file that isn't there is skipped with a warning rather than derailing the rest of the list. (Directory auto-advance is off in playlist mode — the list is the running order.)

Seeking

Direct-play files seek natively via HTTP byte ranges. During a transcode (burn-in or codec fallback) the stream isn't byte-seekable, so a seek restarts ffmpeg at the new offset (-ss) and re-points the TV at the fresh stream. You scrub; it copes.

Layout

All the orchestration lives behind internal/core, so the CLI is a thin client — and a future HTTP/GUI front-end would be too.

main.go                  thin CLI: parse flags -> core.CastRequest -> render + drive TUI
internal/core            the reusable API: plan a cast, start it, control it, tear it down
internal/discovery       SSDP discovery (goupnp) -> Device + service clients
internal/renderer        AVTransport + RenderingControl + DIDL-Lite building
internal/mediaserver     local HTTP server (direct-play range + transcode pipe)
internal/probe           ffprobe wrapper + subtitle classification
internal/subs            subtitle strategy + extract/burn/remux ffmpeg args
internal/transcode       codec-compatibility transcode args
internal/tui             bubbletea view layer
internal/config          remembers the last device
internal/resume          remembers playback position per file (~/.movcaster)
internal/nextep          finds the next episode in the directory (auto-advance)
internal/playlist        parses a playlist file (one video path per line)