Cast videos from your phone to your Android TV

An Android TV handles Netflix and YouTube beautifully. A video file sitting in your phone's storage is a different story. The built-in cast button only works with apps that support it, your gallery app usually doesn't, and the common workarounds all have a catch: copy the file to a USB stick and walk it over, mirror your whole screen, or upload the movie somewhere first.

There's a simpler route: put a player on the TV and stream the file to it directly. That's what Chusko does. Your phone keeps the file and the controls. The TV just plays.

What you need

• An Android TV or Google TV device: a TV with it built in, or a box or stick running it.
• The Chusko app from the Play Store on both devices. One install covers both worlds; the same app shows up in your phone launcher and your TV launcher.
• Internet access on both devices for the pairing step. Same Wi-Fi is fastest.

The steps

1. Open Chusko on the TV. It starts as a Screen and shows a six-character code. TVs always take the Screen role; they display and nothing more.
2. Open Chusko on your phone and pick "I'm the Projector." This side holds the video and controls playback.
3. Pair them. Type the code shown on the TV, or point your phone camera at the QR code, which fills it in for you. If both devices share a Wi-Fi network, you can skip this entirely: rooms hosted nearby appear automatically on the TV, so joining takes one press of a button on the remote.
4. Pick a video on your phone. Playback starts while the file is still transferring. You don't wait for the whole movie to cross the link first.
5. Stay in control from your phone. Play, pause, seek, volume, and 10-second skip buttons run from the projector and execute on the TV.

How this beats the alternatives

• A USB stick works, but it's a chore. You copy the file, physically move it, and then the TV's built-in player decides which formats it feels like playing. Fine once a year, tedious every weekend.
• Mirroring puts everything on screen. Your notifications included, at whatever quality the capture pipeline manages, while your battery drains. Casting a file shows only the video, at its original quality.
• Uploading to a cloud service adds hours and a copy. A two-hour movie can take longer to upload than to watch on typical home upload speeds, and afterwards your file sits on someone else's servers. Chusko sends the bytes straight from your phone to the TV over an encrypted connection. Nothing lands anywhere else.

Formats and quality

Chusko streams raw file bytes, and the TV decodes them itself. No conversion happens at any point, so what plays is the original quality. Phone recordings, MP4s downloaded from odd places, MKVs, MOVs: anything the screen device can decode will play, including files that USB players reject because their index sits at the end of the file.

Present PDFs and PowerPoint on the TV, too

The same pairing works for documents. Choose a PDF, PPT, or PPTX on the Projector and control pages or slides from there. PDF layouts can show one, two, or four pages, with rotation. PowerPoint slides are static images; animations and embedded video do not play. A browser can also be your Projector. Follow the screenshot guides forPDFs on TV andPowerPoint presentations.

Speed on the same Wi-Fi

When both devices run the Chusko app on the same network, the TV pulls the file straight off your phone over the LAN at full speed. Across different networks the transfer runs over WebRTC instead, still direct between the two devices.

Don't have an Android TV? The same flow works with any laptop or desktop browser as the screen: see casting without uploading. Curious where the bytes go? Read why your media should never touch a server or check the FAQ.