Title: Chromecasting using a custom Chromium build
Date: 2018-01-23
Lang: en

I'm using [Gentoo](http://www.gentoo.org) as my Linux distro of choice. Gentoo compiles everything from source giving you a maximum flexibility - but that's another story.

At work we're traditionally an Apple shop - with some exceptions including me. We have an Apple TV device and a big TV screen in our meeting room for presentations. All of my attempts to share the Linux screen on the Apple TV device failed - studying the [unofficial AirPlay documentation](https://nto.github.io/AirPlay.html) clearly shows that this will not be an easy route to take.

So we looked for a more cross platform screen sharing solution and came up with [Chromecast device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromecast) - it's a cheap device with screen sharing support built into every chrome browser.

Screen sharing from an Apple worked out of the box. The same goes for linux - you can download the binary chrome build from google, unpack it and start casting to the device.

Using my custom gentoo build of chromium, however I was not able to stream to the Chromecast device out of the box. After some googling I came across [a hint on the Chromecast help forum](https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/chromecast/hpwVn7E2V1M/YwsNq9UtAQAJ):

1. Open a new tab in Chrome
1. Type `chrome://flags/#load-media-router-component-extension` into the address bar 
1. Make sure the flag is enabled. If it is enabled, try disabling it, restart the browser and re-enable it

After making this tweak the Chromecast device became available on my chromium browser and I was able to share my screen with the device.