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Turning normal HDTV into Smart HDTV

One word ChromeCast. That will do it. There is no need to pay a premium for a Smart TV when Chromecast can outperform any of them for a fraction of the cost. Also, there are reports of some Smart TVs stealing user browsing behavior for commercial purposes. The worst was the claim that some TVs secretly listen to the conversation of the people in the room. I cannot verify the truthfulness of these reports but all these are viable possibilities if a malicious app has been secretly installed in the Smart TV. So I would rather play it safe and use Chromecast (since Google has all my data anyways). So we need to buy the Chromecast device and install the Chromecast app on the phone and that will transform the non-smart TV into an entertainment hub. However, just installing the Chromecast app on the phone does not satisfy a power user. Therefore, I chose to explore the possibilities of "Home entertainment".

1. Streaming movies from phone - Install Chromecast app. This is simple and most straighforward way to use it.

2. Streaming movies from the computer - Install Videostream app in Chrome and play the files straight from the local hard drive. However, one drawback of the free version is that it does not support adding a subtitle file. So the only options are to either pay for it or encode the subtitle files into the video files themselves. I will choose the latter option. We will need to create a mkv container and then embed the video and the subtitle files in that container. Videostream supports mkv files so it will stream the video to the TV along with the embedded subtitles.

The embedding can be done with a single command

mkvmerge -o output.mkv video.mp4 eng.srt

However, if there is a lag in the subtitle file and it needs to be resynced with the video file then a couple of additional steps will be required. I wrote an article about it here.

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