Kast

English | Deutsch

A lean, portable video player for Windows that plays almost any format and casts to Chromecast, DLNA and AirPlay devices.

• Plays MP4, M4V, MKV, AVI, MOV, WebM, WMV, TS and more – powered by mpv with hardware decoding
• Cast button in the player: Chromecast / Google TV, DLNA smart TVs and AirPlay receivers on your network
• Choose the audio track and subtitles (embedded or external .srt/.ass/.vtt, loaded automatically), on the PC and on the TV
• Subtitle style editor: font, size, color, bold/italic, border, shadow, background box, position – applied live
• Playlist from the folder, recently opened files, resume where you left off, subtitle/audio delay, playback speed, screenshots, URLs
• Keyboard shortcuts you can change in the settings
• Portable: no installation, settings in settings.json next to the EXE
• English and German UI (follows the Windows language), light and dark theme, Windows accent color

Download

• Latest release – download Kast-<version>-win-x64.7z, unpack it into a folder of your choice and run Kast.exe.

• Or with Scoop:

  scoop bucket add naderi https://github.com/naderi/scoop-bucket
  scoop install naderi/kast
  

Using it

• Open a video with the button, by drag & drop, from the command line or (optionally) with "Open with" in Explorer
• Stop: the ■ button next to play ends playback and returns to the start screen (the position is kept for resuming)
• Mouse: click = pause, double-click = fullscreen, wheel = volume, drag the video to move the window
• Keys (all changeable in the settings): Space pause · ←/→ 5 s (Shift: 1 s) · ↑/↓ volume · M sound on/off · F fullscreen · S subtitles on/off · V next subtitle track · A next audio track · Z/X subtitle delay · Ctrl+Plus/Minus speed (Ctrl+0 normal) · R rotate picture by 90° · Ctrl+Shift+S screenshot · N/P next/previous · Ctrl+O open · Ctrl+R recent files · Ctrl+, settings
• The window keeps the video's aspect ratio, so there are no black bars; Fill window (crop) in the ⚙ menu fills it completely
• Rotate picture (right-click menu or R) turns a video that is sideways or upside down, 90° per step, also on the TV; videos with rotation information (phone videos) are shown upright automatically

Casting

Click the cast button in the control bar at the bottom and pick a device. The video on the PC pauses, and the player controls – pause, seek, volume, audio track, subtitles, subtitle delay and style – now control the TV. Next/previous switches the file on the TV, and at the end of a video the next file of the folder follows. While casting, the stop button next to play turns into a cast symbol with a stop badge and ends casting; the PC continues where the TV left off.

Kast streams the file from the PC over your local network:

Device	Plays directly	Converted on the fly
Chromecast / Google TV	MP4 / WebM with H.264, VP8 (HEVC/VP9 on 4K models) and AAC, MP3, Opus, FLAC	other containers are repacked without quality loss; other video codecs are re-encoded with the GPU encoder (NVENC, Quick Sync, AMF or Media Foundation)
DLNA TVs	MP4 with H.264 and AAC/MP3	repacked or re-encoded to MPEG-TS
AirPlay	MP4 with H.264/HEVC and AAC	repacked or re-encoded to HLS

Subtitles are drawn by the Chromecast itself, with your subtitle style. DLNA and AirPlay devices get them burned into the picture (also used for image subtitles such as PGS on the Chromecast).

Notes:

• PC and device must be in the same network. If nothing appears on the TV, allow Kast in the Windows firewall for private networks.
• AirPlay: devices that require pairing with a PIN (recent Apple TVs) are not supported yet.

Options

The ⚙ menu → Settings:

• Language, theme
• Resume, hardware decoding, show subtitles automatically, preferred audio and subtitle languages (default: English, then German)
• Prevent sleep while casting – the TV streams from the PC, so sleep would stop playback; the screen may still turn off
• Screenshot folder (default: Pictures\Kast)
• Subtitle style
• Integration – all off by default, Kast changes nothing outside its folder unless you switch them on: "Open with" for video files, desktop shortcut, start menu shortcut
• Updates

Program updates

Kast updates itself from the releases of this repository:

• Once a day it looks for a new version in the background (can be switched off: Check automatically (once a day)). A new version lights an orange dot on the ⓘ button.
• In the about window (ⓘ): Check for updates → Download update → Restart & update.
• A download is only used if its signature (.sig) matches the key built into Kast; anything else is rejected. settings.json stays untouched.
• The update replaces Kast.exe only. If a release brings newer libmpv-2.dll / ffmpeg.exe, the about window says so: download Kast-x.y.z-win-x64.7z, quit Kast and unpack it into the Kast folder, replacing the existing files.
• Installed with Scoop, Kast only points to scoop update kast.

License

Freeware – free to use, but not for sale. See LICENSE. The included libmpv-2.dll (mpv) and ffmpeg.exe (FFmpeg) are separate LGPL components, see LICENSE and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.

Support

If Kast saves you time, you can support its development on Ko‑fi. ☕

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© 2026 Ali Naderi · digitalent.dev