VideoCast: Starting a new Project

The Project

For TDLR people; I plan on creating a casting app for samsung TV and my android phone. The android app will allow me to send a video link to my TV app which will then stream the video.

For the rest, please continue with the article.

A little background

After moving to South Korea, I wanted to learn something new and work on a side project which is on the userspace side. I also wanted to work on a project that has direct use in my life.

I have a tizen TV which has apps from major vendors like Youtube, Netflix…etc. Whenever I want to watch a movie or a TV series more often than not, it is not available on Netflix, Amazon..etc. And hence I have to stream those things from some “other sites”. I hate to attach my computer to the TV as it disturbs my working environment. So what I want is to have an app which allows me to send video links from my phone over to my TV and then the TV streams the video for me.

Luckily I was able to find an already existing app for this, called VideoCast and the free version provided the basic functionality, but it was mostly unusable if you are unwilling to buy the paid version. And then I decided that it could be the perfect project that I had wanted since when.

So over the course of a month or so I will be working on this project and reporting my findings on this blog. I was also thinking of writing some guide or tutorial to document what I learn along the way. In this blog, I will devise a brief plan on how to go about this. I will not add any dates as managing time for a side project when you have a full-time job is difficult.

Action Plan

1. Write a basic video streaming for my TV
2. Write a barebones app for my mobile. With all the fuss around flutter, I can give it a try this time.
3. Send data from phone to TV
4. Decide on the features I need to support
5. Design a UI for the product
6. Start working on both the apps parallely

The code for both the apps will be opensource and people are welcome to contribute.