Cast Gorilla
Making video streaming to the TV feel easy.
Getting my media onto the TV
I built Cast Gorilla to see how far I could push the work I was doing with AI and try a new direction, while solving a problem that had come up in my day-to-day life.
I spend a lot of time with digital media and have built a big collection over the years. I have a home media server on a NAS, connected to my home entertainment system, but the hard drives had started to fail. I needed a way to transcode video and stream it to my TV in the meantime.
That turned out to be harder than it should be. Between DRM, platform lock-ins and devices supporting different formats and codecs, taking a piece of media from your laptop and watching it on your TV can be surprisingly difficult. I wanted the freedom to use and stream my own collection without having to work through those technical details each time.
Letting the app handle the formats
The experience I wanted was simple: take a video file on your MacBook and stream it directly to your Google TV or Chromecast. If the device supported the file, it could stream directly. If it needed transcoding, that would happen on the fly in the background. My aim was to make that work with whatever video someone wanted to watch.
The app checks what needs to change. Sometimes the video can stay untouched and only the audio needs converting. It explains what it's doing in plain English, so you can see how it will stream the file.
I also wanted it to look and feel personal and easy to use. A lot of the media streaming software I'd encountered had complicated interfaces that felt designed for technical users. I wanted someone to be able to choose their video and watch it, without needing to understand the formats involved.
Testing with real devices
Getting the streaming working meant testing it on the devices themselves. I used an NVIDIA Shield and a Chromecast HD, with a custom command-line tool to run repeated tests of the streaming engine. That gave Claude Code and Codex a way to check their changes against what the hardware would actually play.
Still developing it
The result is something I'm really proud of. Cast Gorilla is open source, it looks really good, and it works pretty well. I'm continuing to develop it, and I'm hoping to extend support to Apple TV in the future.
Built with: TypeScript, Electron, ffmpeg (VideoToolbox + AudioToolbox), CASTV2, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor
Part of the Rolling Waves work archive.