How to cast movies from Kodi to Chromecast on a PC

There are lots of guides out there showing how to cast media from an android device via Kodi to Chromecast, but just a few for how to cast from a PC.

After doing some research, I found that I can cast from Kodi to Chromecast by using VLC media player as an external player. Note that you will need VLC v3.0+ for this to work, since Chromecast support was added after this version.

The steps below show how I did it on my Ubuntu laptop, but same procedure should work on ther Linux distros as well. Also, same logic should apply on Windows machines.


Steps

• Install latest version of Kodi
• Install latest version of VLC media player (v3.0+)
• Copy the following content and create this file in your home folder .kodi/userdata/playercorefactory.xml . This is basically saying to Kodi to use VLC to playback the media content instead of its built in player.Please modify any settings according to your specific setup.

• Open Kodi and start a movie.
• Wait for VLC to open, it should start the playback shortly.
• In order to cast to Chromecast, use Playback , Renderer , Chromecast Device

Before this method, I was using Google Chrome to do the playback, by using its "cast tab" option, but the playback was very choppy compared to VLC.