
Chromium is no longer supported for Chromecast - keeperofdakeys
https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/chromecast/cpADBG10NfA/qymp1sGOAQAJ
======
zx2c4
I'm on my phone right now, and just skimmed that thread for about 10 seconds,
but it reminded me of a commit I saw a few days ago when skimming another page
for 10 seconds. All that skimming appears to be paying off. Maybe Batman is a
skimmer too...

[https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/2962c9c21ab...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/2962c9c21ab9dd1ebd407f7dcda01c817e4f75da)

The original poster appears to be hit by a bug that was fixed by this commit,
which is a part of the latest Chromium release. Just a bug that was fixed...
no controversy.

------
gcb0
People really have any expectation from Google devices?

Even android which whole marketing is that it is "more open" only receives
self-serving features. Btw, the access to chrome-cast is baked in the
playStore service. So your app has to be compiled with full google play store
tracking library to use it. ...i used to help maintain a version of fenec
(firefox for android) that was build without chromecast support just because
of this (and if you want it, gnu now maintains a better version called IceCat)

Oh, and even plain-open-source projects... there were 4 attempts to have an
option to disable referrer on chromium. All of them reverted by google
employers on unrelated commits. So even chromium is not that safe.

~~~
fulafel
This is more about Google's desktop software (removing stuff from Chromium)
than about Google's devices.

~~~
gcb0
i mention an example on exactly that too...

------
alexmat
The new cast feature in recent builds of chromium is not working for me. It
fails to find any devices. Looking at the debug output it says: "media router
not defined."

After a bit of googling I found you can revert back to using the old cast
extension by following these instructions:
[https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6349849?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6349849?hl=en)

~~~
acdimalev
Thank you! I don't know if this was up the last time I looked.

There are flags to gate the feature in the source-- looks like the iOS build
excludes it. Going to leave a build running overnight and give it a look in
the morning. If tearing it out works, I'll post a patch to the Debian bug
report.

[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833477](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833477)

~~~
acdimalev
Disabling media router from source is apparently more involved than I thought
it would be. Could have changed the default setting in a new user profile, but
disabling it with a command-line argument is probably more like what I'm
looking for here.

[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833477#44](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833477#44)

------
jfoster
This isn't a response from a Google employee, right?

My understanding is that there is some sort of volunteer programme for Google
forums. (Side-note: Is there anything in it for the volunteers? How does
Google convince them to do this?)

~~~
startling
I think she may be a Google employee. Google's product / support forums are
always like this, it's terrible.

~~~
jfoster
Pretty sure she's not. If you hover over the icon on her profile picture, it
says "Expert - Google Products". I can't find an example, but as I recall they
have something like "Google Employee" that leaves it in no doubt when it's an
employee response.

~~~
startling
I've never seen that, but maybe I've never seen an answer by an actual google
employee. :/

------
jptman
I wonder if this has anything to do with the rumoured 4k Chromecast. I
wouldn't be surprised if they have some interesting tech to support it they
don't want to make public.

Edit: Nevermind, it looks like Chrome lately has built-in support for
Chromecast (I see it under the menu as Cast). From this, I can surmise a
couple of things:

1\. Google wants users to be able to use a chromecast out of the box without
installing an extension. Can't fault them for that because believe it or not,
not everyone knows how to do that. Or there's some limitation I don't know
about in extensions that they want to get around.

2\. This means that Google would either have to open-source the Chromecast
functionality in the browser, or it has to maintain both the functionality
baked into Chrome and the browser extension. So, they'd have to keep
supporting a browser extension they'd not need for Chrome just to support
Chromium.

I don't know.. May be a good compromise if possible would've been to bundle
Chrome with the chromecast extension. But I doubt when someone came up with
the idea of bundling Chromecast in the browser for purpose X, someone else in
the team said: But think of Chromium!

------
taspeotis
Was it ever supported? The response in the forum is "[a]t this time, Chromium
is not supported for use with Google Cast." which doesn't explicitly say that
support was retracted.

Original title, lest it changes:

    
    
        Chromium is no longer supported for Chromecast (productforums.google.com)
        3 points by keeperofdakeys 1 hour ago

~~~
DrAwesome
I don't have a Chromecast set up, so I'm not 100% sure on this, but my
understanding is that Chromium users could cast using the Google Cast
extension, and that Google did something (intentionally or unintentionally) to
break the Cast extension and didn't fix it because casting is built into
directly into Chrome now.

~~~
Sylos
Yeah, you could cast with the Google Cast extension over Chromium.

And it's generally believed that Google moved the Chromecast-functionality
into Chrome and away from an extension to not necessarily lock out Chromium,
but rather to lock out other Chromium-based browsers which could use their
extensions, so for example Opera.

Firefox and, I believe, Edge are also getting support for Chrome extensions in
the foreseeable future, so this might have increased the incentive to lock out
browsers that can use their extensions, too.

~~~
jeremydw
What is that speculation based on? Why wouldn't Google want more browsers to
be able to Cast?

My opinion: I feel like this is a pro-user move with an unfortunate side
effect of breaking/unsupporting an extension. If I just want to cast to my TV
why should I have to hunt for an extension. I'd rather it "just work" via a
context menu in the browser.

~~~
int_19h
It favors a particular implementation (Chromecast) in a market where there are
several competing standards and no established leader. Shouldn't Miracast, for
example, "just work" as well?

~~~
DiabloD3
Miracast is a streaming endpoint. As in, you typically throw H264+AAC at it.

Chromecast, however, is amount remote controlling a secondary Chrome HTML
canvas on the Chromecast, where the intended use is manipulating a <video>
object.

You can cast a tab to your Chromecast, thus treating it like Miracast, but
that is largely not what the Chromecast is meant for.

Example, I can have Youtube (the website or the phone app) cast a queue of
videos to the Chromecast, interact with that queue from multiple devices, and
even disconnect all devices, and the Chromecast keeps playing because it
streams the video directly from Youtube, not my phone or browser.

Miracast cannot do any of these things.

In addition, the only functioning Miracast device I've ever discovered is
Microsoft's Wireless Display Adapter. All the built in Miracast end point
impls in TVs and such are utter garbage and usually don't work.

------
josteink
Usually I'm all for that everything made these days, should work across all
browsers.

That said, the Chromecast was always named just that: Chrome-cast, after
Google's proprietary browser. It was for instance not called the Web-cast.
That's a pretty clear signal right there.

There's a thousand different browsers available to the curious user these
days, but for years and years now the only (2?) browsers that have been
supported was chrome and chromium.

Firefox for instance, has never received support. A big fuck you to what at
the time was 25% of all internet users. The "fix"? Tell people to move to
chrome (and how is Chrome's market share these days?).

This change just brings the amount of supported browsers down from 2 to 1 and
the amount of unsupported browsers up from 998 to 999. Hardly a big change if
you think about it.

Now... You have a proprietary browser, running proprietary nonstandard
extensions to interact with proprietary online services and give them
preferential treatment...

That's way beyond anything Microsoft did in the 90s to get the famous MSIE
antitrust conviction.

How come Google gets off scot free?

