Chromecasting using a custom Chromium build

I’m using Gentoo 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 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 - 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:

1. Open a new tab in Chrome
2. Type chrome://flags/#load-media-router-component-extension into the address bar
3. 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.