This month, after coming back from my time off, I turned on my work laptop and started catching up on everything that happened during my absence. Music makes this process more enjoyable, so I started up Spotify and started playing some tunes. I was very surprised (and mildly pissed) when playback abruptly stopped and Spotify seemingly went offline.

As part of my efforts to over-engineer my TV watching I had to eventually build my own Chromecast receiver. I decided I wanted to leverage the extra features and speed offered by the hls.js library, taking for granted the fact that the integration with the Chromecast would have been easy. Boy I was wrong!

In this post, I’ll talk about Chromecaster, the daemon I created to control my Chromecast and a key component of my over-engineered system designed to consume Italian TV abroad.

This is the first part of a series of posts where I will detail how I built a complex system to consume Italian TV abroad entirely from a single web app and a Chromecast.

Recently, I’ve been tinkering with a Hikvision surveillance system which includes an Android Indoor Station aptly named DS-KH9510-WTE1. Whilst this runs Android behind the scenes, it exposes a custom UI made by Hikvision that completely hides the standard Android screens and menus.