This is a long overdue article and I decided to post it so I can simply send it to all those who ask me about the best but also easiest way to play local videos on a Chromecast.

Some may prefer other ways of playing local videos on Chromecast, including using a command line tool such as stream2chromecast, pulseaudio-dlna to  play music from a computer to a Chromecast, as well as the VideoStream Chromecast extension (which I hear is unreliable lately).

Plex is, however, the complete solution for all local media streaming to Chromecast needs, and is fairly easy to set up, despite my long article.

It can be used to stream local videos (and can transcode videos not supported by Chromecast), music, and photos, both in your local network as well as remotely, e.g. to a hotel or a friend's house.

Furthermore, Plex Media Server is cross-platform, so it can be installed on an a Linux, FreeBSD, Windows or Mac computer, as well as on NAS.

The Unity Movie Lens can be used to search for Movies and using the Previews feature (which can be accessed by right clicking on a search result) available in Ubuntu 12.10, you can see various movie information like the movie cover, rating, genre, artists and a movie description.

The screensaver / lock screen isn't temporarily disabled when playing videos in some applications or in a web browser which can be very annoying, so here are two ways to inhibit the screensaver while watching videos.

VLSub is a VLC extensions to search and download subtitles from opensubtitles.org. The extension can search either based on the video hash or its IMDB title.

The extension can download subtitles in about 49 languages, including English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and more.

IMPloader is a script that fetches the posters for the top 10 Box Office movies of the week and automatically generates a wallpaper. You can customize how many images are used (but there's a maximum of 10), the style (black, white and polaroid), width and height of the wallpaper and border of the images.

Here are two examples of wallpapers generated using IMPloader:

Subtitle Editor is a GTK tool to edit subtitles. It can be used for new subtitles or as a tool to transform, edit, correct and refine existing subtitle. This program also shows sound waves, which makes it easier to synchronise subtitles to voices.

SubtitleEditor 0.38.0 was released about two weeks ago and it includes many bug fixes such as:

PhotoFilmStrip is an application for Windows and Linux that you can use to create a movie (slideshow) from images. It uses the "Ken Burns" effect for the pictures transitions and you can also add music and captions to your images. You can further customize the video by setting the duration time for each image, the transition and transition time and additionally, the effect (sepia or black and white). The video can be rendered in VCD, SVCD, DVD or FULL-HD (1920x1080).