Castor: a CLI that rips web video streams and casts them to any DLNA TV

Castor is a command-line tool that solves a narrow annoyance: getting web video onto a TV without a Chromecast, AirPlay, or laggy, resolution-crushing screen mirroring. Instead of mirroring your display, it captures the actual stream and pushes it at full quality to any TV supporting the DLNA/UPnP MediaRenderer profile — which covers essentially every smart TV sold in the last decade, plus players like Kodi, VLC, and Plex. You can hand it a page URL, a direct stream link, or an IMDB/TMDB id, and drive the whole thing from an interactive terminal browser backed by a TMDB API key.

The interesting part is how it obtains the stream. Castor drives headless Chrome with a randomized fingerprint and anti-automation stealth scripts, watches all traffic via the Chrome DevTools Protocol to grab the video URL, then runs a scripted action pipeline — clicking the page, diving into the largest iframe, and even solving a Cloudflare Turnstile if one appears. ffmpeg handles transcoding to a TV-friendly format, and an optional whisper.cpp integration auto-generates and burns in subtitles. It’s a clear example of the same headless-browser evasion techniques used in scraping and bot activity being packaged for consumer media use.

The project is careful to frame itself as content-neutral: it hosts nothing and ships no default streaming sites, leaving source selection and legal responsibility to the user — the classic dual-use disclaimer, given that the example config points at third-party embed proxies that can vanish overnight. Practically, the native binary is the recommended path because device discovery relies on SSDP multicast and a local replay server that don’t survive Docker’s bridge network; Docker only works from a Linux host on the same LAN with host networking, and is a silent dead end on Docker Desktop for macOS and Windows.